Disclaimer: I haven't lied or changed any names in this account (who's innocent anyway?), but I have left a few names and details out, mostly because there's stuff that's private to other people, and I have no right talking about that. I hope that nothing I've written has caused anyone involved to feel misrepresented; if that's the case,they should feel free to mail me about it and I'll try to sort things out. This account can, obviously, only be from my perspective, so it's possible that other things happened related to it of which I have no knowledge; I say only what I know, and try to be as fair as possible.
I was born in a storm on July the 14th, 1973, ten days later than expected - my mother joked that I'd deliberately missed the American festivities in preference for the French ones, the Fete Nationale - it's also Iraqi National Day. Briefly struggling for oxygen, I turned red, white and blue in succession. I was a fairly large baby, the only time I've managed that in my life. There were other oddities about me which were overlooked at the time, and this decided much of the course of my life; but that morning no-one thought anything of it. I was an alert, vocal, bright baby girl.
At the time of my birth, my parents were living in a small house on an estate called Wincobank in the east end of Sheffield, England. One of the earliest things I can remember was the sound of disused factories being knocked down. Later, when I was older, we would make a day out from going to see the tall chimneys fall. I didn't understand then why some people cried at the sight.
I was named after my great grandmother, who died before I was born. She was a flapper in the jazz age, and I still wear some of her beautiful black velvet clothes and cut glass jewellery. I trace my ancestry back to Ireland on my father's side and the Invernesshire area, with its heavy Viking settlement, on my mother's; such research is helped by the fact that I'm a bundle of recessive genes. My great grandfather and his brother came down from Inverness on the run; no-one ever found out what they'd done, but it was probably cattle theft, as nothing else would have got them in quite so much trouble. My great grandfather promptly died, leaving his mad brother (who refused to wear or eat anything green because 'it had the Devil in it') to raise his son. That's the 'commoner' side of my family, and the reason my gran resented my parents' marriage. Her husband was titled a Knight Commander of the British Empire, was in charge of air force education, and is still quite well remembered in such circles for his book Mechanics of Flight. I never got to meet him, though, as he died just before I was born.
Running away from one's homeland and mispronouncing one's name to please the English was not altogether shocking in Munros, the clan's honour always having acknowledged the importance of adaptability. In the Jacobite wars of the 1700s, Munros fought on both sides; in fact, they did this in most European wars, not because they were divided but because they were pragmatic. Fighting on both sides meant always being amongst the victors, and cousins on the losing side, having heroic sponsors, could soon be reconciled. Expanding on this military tradition, many Munros became mercenaries and worked abroad. There is still a small village in the Italian Alps which celebrates an annual Highland Games.
The Kermodes, whom nobody can ever pronounce, especially in England, are the Manx sept of the McDiarmids (or McDermots). I have never been to the Isle of Man - it's not exactly culturally hospitable to the likes of me - but I was told a lot about my ancestry as a child. Man was a haven for the descendents of Diar Mid after they fled Ireland, having been blamed for cursing it. Diar Mid himself was the first free man in Celtic history, the first to doubt the necessity of deferring to a monarch. He fell in love with the Queen of Ireland, the famously beautiful Grainne, and eloped with her. Before she got sick of living in mud, betrayed her lover and returned to her husband, she bore him a daughter, and it is from that daughter that history unfurls down here to me. So we see ourselves in the proper context, and are properly aware of the unlikeliness of our existence.
Unlikeliness has sometimes seemed to define my life. My Norse ancestors, on both sides of the family, bred for luck; luck was a trait to be sought out in a prospective partner, like physical fitness, height or wealth. Modern Scandinavians are notably tall, healthy people. It doesn't take a Niven to start asking questions, nor to note that luck isn't always a pleasant thing. The Irish were superstitious about people of my appearance. But a child is just a child, and when the world was new to me I explored it with vigour, quite unaware of that other past.
My first specific early memory is of pouring ribena (the world's best blackcurrant juice drink, sadly now owned by Proctor & Gamble, such that I cannot, in good conscience, drink it) over my cabbage in a vain attempt to make it taste better. I still hate boiled cabbage. Of course, our early recollections often have more to do with the stories told by others than with anything in our own minds, but taste and smell are sensations particularly strongly rooted, and, for me, the same is true of colour; I loved ribena for its rich purpleness, a love which stayed with me.
When I was two I was given a purple velvet dress to dress up in for games. I insisted on wearing it as much of the time as I could get away with. I adored it, and decided then and there that I always wanted to wear clothes like that. Patent shoes were my other obsession: first red, which was vitally important if one desired high social status at nursery school; and then black, which seemed sophisticated and rebellious both at once. I didn't get them, though; I was told I'd only scratch and scuff them. In my room, I treasured secret scraps of fabric collected from various places - all the beautiful things which I couldn't yet wear, but could dream about.
My mother was a teacher and my father a research physicist; I count myself lucky for that, as it provided me with a rounded education right from the start. My mother taught me to read by the time I was two and my father never quite got the hang of me not understanding advanced maths and astronomy from the start. ;) I remember him teaching me the basics of calculus when I was about four (though it would be a long time before I understood their relevance), and he used to annoy my mother by turning the cutlery and pepper pot and plates on our dinner table into different astral bodies so as to explain their motion. I always loved hearing about space, which was one of my major obsessions, along with dinosaurs. Every day when he came home from work I'd ask "Dad, how did the universe begin?", and he'd say "All we have are theories."
"You mean you don't know?"
"That's what I mean."
"What kind of scientist are you?!?"
But he taught me the importance of not knowing, and recognising that, which is, I think, sometimes just as important as certainty. He taught me to ask questions, and to never entirely trust answers.
I broke my right arm when I was two, falling out of my parents' bed. I was rushed to casualty, but they turned me away without an x-ray, saying it looked fine. Since I kept screaming and complaining for a week, I was then taken to the family doctor, who took one look at it and said it was broken. I was then taken back to the hospital and introduced to amazing giant machines, the most naked metal I'd ever seen in one place. I was in awe of the machines, to the extent that I almost forgot about my arm. The nurses did their best to answer my questions. I learned about radiation for the first time. Later, I was given my first general anaesthetic, while the bones in my arm were snapped back into place. I remember lying under a pink fluffy blanket, picking bits off it, being told to "count to six, and then you'll be asleep" and counting to thirty. Afterwards I had a cast, which was fun. I was most scared by the thought of them cutting it off, as I imagined they'd have to use a big saw and might get my arm by mistake, but as it turned out, they used scissors, and my flesh remained intact.
Some time in late 1975 my mother took me into her bedroom and sat me down beside her on the blue-flowered duvet, and asked "How would you like a little brother or sister?" I wasn't fooled. I hadn't paid much attention to her change in shape up until then, but when the question was asked it became obvious. "Don't you think you've left it a bit late to ask me?" I responded. "What would you do if I said 'no'?" She responded that she wasn't sure, and went on to do what I had expected she would do, which was to try and persuade me. Truth be told, I didn't mind the idea all that much, but I wasn't happy about it - I'd enjoyed the attention which comes with being an only child. I accepted her assurances not because they made sense but simply because I could do nothing about them, which laid the foundations for most of my significant experiences with adults over the next sixteen years. We concluded that a brother would be most acceptable. Later, of course, I was to regret that, and entertain the notion that a sister would have caused me far less trouble; but to be fair, as I have never understood girls, I think a brother probably was the best thing. And a brother it was.
Tom was born when I was two and a half years old, at the start of a long hot summer when there was a hosepipe ban and all the grass in our garden turned yellow. I went to stay at my father's place of work whilst my mother was in hospital. There I got to play with a computer for the first time (a Commodore Pet), and had binary explained to me. I had excellent fun visiting the chemistry labs next door and learning about liquid nitrogen; roses which look perfectly fresh, but shatter like glass when swung against the wall.
My brother was, for quite some time, the centre of attention for everyone. I didn't really mind this, as I had a lot of things to do by myself, especially with my new-found interest in experimental science, but it probably compounded my tendency to be an unsociable child. I had hoped that Tom would be someone I could play with, but he took a while to get to that stage. In the meantime, he acted with what seemed like malice, pissing all over my favourite navy blue pinafore, which made everyone else laugh and made me want to break things. Still, I never felt angry towards him. He had a sort of power, retained throughout his childhood, whereby he could charm virtually anyone into liking him and even agreeing with him. We were almost opposites in that regard, but it was to make us effective allies. For many of the years which followed, he was to be my best friend.
It was around the time of my brother's birth that I began to be sexually abused. I'm not going to go into details about that because I want to protect my family and also because I still find it very difficult to talk about (it was twenty years before I could talk about it at all). I feel that I should mention it because it affected a lot of what happened in my later life. I tried for years to express to my parents that something was wrong, and my mother said she realised that, but simply 'never knew what it was'. I have found it difficult to forgive her for not trying harder to find out, but I guess she was only human, and had her own fears and insecurities to deal with. Having talked to her more about it recently, I'm quite sure that she genuinely didn't know what was going on, and that she wanted the best for me. At any rate, I never felt close to my family; I never experienced that love for them which is supposed to come naturally, and I never really felt safe at home, nor in many other places. I became quite aggressive and desperate to assert myself, because all the time I was being told that my opinion didn't matter and that when I thought something unnatural or wrong that was because my perception was skewed and I was mad. That side of things was by far the most damaging aspect of it. It still affects my confidence to this day. I was called a liar a lot, which probably contributed to my (I'm told) extreme intolerance of lying now, and my scrupulous honesty. Honesty as a defence - as a proof of what's real.
To the best of my memory, the abuse lasted for about three years, up until the time I started school and began to get more confidence as a result of making new friends, began to stand up for myself better, I guess. I don't remember perfectly because I was so young, and because I did my best to blank a lot of it out, which is why it came back in later life in nightmares and flashbacks. The knowledge was always there, visible now when I re-read early writings, but I wouldn't look at it or analyse it at all, I just kept it distant. I guess my mind wanted to wait until it was stronger before processing that. Sometimes I remember completely new things, later things, just small events that fit in like missing pieces and make other things make sense, and that's probably the scariest part.
I used to draw pictures of stick-figure boys, then flesh out their arms and legs with woolly clothing. I liked drawing black children because I had to remember where I wanted to put facial features before colouring the main part of the face. But all my little girls had long blond hair and long triangular dresses and no arms. I remember thinking that it wasn't beautiful for them to have arms, and they ought to be beautiful. If they were princesses, somebody might save them. I was too young, then, to realise that I at least would have to save myself.
Sheffield, at that time, was a city still clogged with smoke and soot and poison from the tail end of the industrial revolution. The whole place seemed to shudder and cough when anything moved. Indifferent grey clouds pulsed overhead, reflecting the hopelessness of the growing unemployed. When I was very small I frequently encountered men who worked for the steel industry, or down the mines. When I was fifteen, the steel industry museum was set to be closed due to lack of funding, a relic of a way of life which was itself a relic of a bygone century. Time moved slowly in the grey city. Not so far beyond were canals and woollen mills, stubbornly falling into disuse. We visited them on school trips. We would also go regularly to the milk bottling plant to hear about the wonders of pasteurisation, part of the miracle of progress.
The hospital where I took my first breath was a red-brick building then stained black with soot, and the Wincobank estate was in a similar condition, albeit less sturdy; but Greenhill, the suburb into which we moved when I was one, retained at least some claim on its unlikely title. It had once been a village of sorts; some houses at the centre were three hundred years old, though our own had been built in the 1940s, just after popular architecture forsook elegance in favour of convenience, urgently contributing to the restoration of a heavily bombed city. From this period, the village of Greenhill was swallowed by the hungry suburbs, its green grass surviving only in parkland bequeathed by concerned aristocrats, and in a private cricket field. This field stood at the top of a steep hill which ran past the side of my house, the sort of danger children with skateboards and bikes can't resist. We had a garden, but I always wanted to play in the streets, where there seemed to be more chance of something interesting happening. Sometimes I would be taken to the park to play on the swings or to pet the animals in the rare breeds centre. There, my brother was rather too trusting with a baby goat, which made a fair go at biting through his finger.
Despite its absorption into the industrial world, Greenhill, like many villages in the area, retained much of its Pagan heritage. Each May the children would gather flowers to make a well dressing, ostensibly a Christian celebration of Spring, yet the old stories persisted. Somehow, we all knew it was about pacifying the spirits which guarded the well, and we took them further gifts of garlands to win their favour, all of us afraid that if we peered too keenly into their dark refuge, curious though we were, they might seize us and drag us in. Less disturbing was the Maypole Dance, in which every child was eager to participate, clad in bright ribbons. In September, we would have the Harvest Festival, where we were all expected to contribute items of locally grown fruit, vegetables and grain, for distribution to the poor. This show of generosity allowed us to forget how poor many of us were ourselves.
Further out, beyond the suburbs, lay the vast emptiness of the Yorkshire Moors. Sheffield sits at the base of the Pennine hills, sometimes called the spine of England, and the high territory there is largely uninhabited except by aggressive half-wild sheep. In the 1970s, wallabies, on the run from zoos, were in the process of establishing a colony there. I would be taken on trips into this country, something I couldn't see any sense in. Adults would wander around gazing at the skyline, at sheered-off cliffs and tors deposited like monuments by ancient glaciers. I would play in the dirt, sore-legged and bored, or sometimes build dams in streams. These were orange with the run-off from the blast furnaces, distant towers belching steam. Sometimes I would collect samples of the water in test cylinders and take it home to watch the metal settle out. I would chew on stems of heather and fill up my pockets with polished stones.
Back in the suburbs, with my father and his car away at work, we were bound by the routes of unreliable buses. The city centre, when one reached it, had the kind of high street shops found everywhere, which satisfied my mother, but she grew frustrated as these gradually disappeared, lured away by out-of-town malls. What remained was provincial and awkward, a town hall lording its authority over boarded-up buildings, a world class theatre sitting awkwardly in the corner of a junction, a series of fine but struggling museums which were always welcoming to children because the only thing they had left to turn to was the future. The future was me, and I knew from the outset that I wanted to leave.
My mother was a feminist, in that particular early 'seventies tradition which seemed to necessitate the wearing of corduroy dungarees and Sensible Shoes (even if one were heterosexual). I protested at the time that the clothes looked awful and the colours clashed, but hey, I was a kid, what did I know? Most of the other feminists I met were in my mother's babysitting circle, and they had a lot of coffee mornings together whilst their husbands were at work. I thought it was kind of quaint, but I never quite fitted into it. My mother and grandma seemed to have some notion of a female lineage of which I was to be a part, mothers passing to daughters some kind of wisdom which men would never be able to share. I couldn't relate to that. It was the first indication I had that I just didn't 'think like a woman' in the normally expected way. Already that made me sad, but it was a vague sadness, little understood. I didn't yet know whether I wanted to try and change myself or change the world.
I was told, sometime around then, that people dressed male babies in blue and female babies in pink, and that if people didn't know what sex a baby was going to be then they would buy yellow things for it. At that point I insisted on having my room painted yellow, and I went through a phase of wanting yellow clothes. I knew quite clearly, in my child's way, that I didn't want to be a girl or a boy; I wanted to be in between.
My parents tried hard to bring me up in a neutral non-religious environment (they were both atheists) so that I could choose for myself; they were brave and considerate when I experimented with going to church, which I could see at the time was something they were emotionally uncomfortable with. I had encountered Christianity on a frequent basis at playgroup, and later at school, and I just wanted to get my head around it. My gran took me to church three times. As it turned out, I found it tedious, and it failed to engage my imagination in any way. I resented being given water instead of wine at the altar (was this the best imitation blood they could come up with?), and I was finally requested to leave after asking for permission to set fire to the small Easter cross I'd been given - it was made from splint-wood, and looked as if that was what had been intended for it. I knew people were passionate about Christianity, and expected, therefore, some more passionate ceremony to take place.
When I was six or seven, a church group came to town and tried to Save me. It masqueraded as an ordinary youth group. When my parents realised it was run by evangelists they rushed in one afternoon and grabbed me and took me home, which confused me no end, as I really didn't see what the big deal was. By then I was used to filtering out what I considered to be other people's irrelevant superstitions, and I'd been having fun hanging out with the other kids there and eating lots of cakes.
Christianity was, for me, always an outside influence, the myth-set of cultural aliens whose geographical domain happened to overlap with mine. I recognised the good intentions of those who tried to teach it to me, and, even in childhood, often defended them against those who thought they had no noble motivation for their interference; but I found their assertions to be full of logical fallacies, and I had no reason to consider their stories more significant than those of other peoples. I frequently wished that they would be less pushy, especially at school, considering that I made no effort to attack their beliefs.
The other notable religious influence in my childhood was Islam, as my mother taught English to isolated Arabic women, and I would hang around at their houses and play with their children. Language differences didn't seem to present much of a barrier at that age. I made friends fast, and we played fun games and ate enormous amounts of sugary food. Although I never adopted that religion either, my early experiences of it were generally more pleasant.
I followed politics intently, under my own steam, by watching daytime news and analysis programmes on TV, and by listening to the radio. Wilson's Labour government was under siege; the whole situation was full of tension and drama and it gripped my imagination. I started to read the books which would teach me the various theories behind the rhetoric. I was determined to be a capable agent in the world, to master its functions. I assumed that was what all grown-ups did.
At first I enjoyed school because of the opportunities it offered me, but I quickly became bored there, being made to read Janet and John books when I wanted to curl up in the corner with my Island of Doctor Moreau. I still found maths fairly difficult (mostly because it wasn't until I was seven that I figured out that memorising my times tables didn't constitute cheating), but most of class went far too slowly, and I was appalled at the thought that I would have to endure that for a further decade. I kept a tally of the number of minutes of classes I would have to sit through before I could legally be done with it. When I got old enough, I used to play truant sometimes in order to go to the library. Otherwise, I spent classes talking to my friends, making plans and designing new projects.
Playtimes were a different matter. From the start, I was the weird kid, because I didn't want to be a girl and play games with girls; I had a big brown furry coat and so identified myself as a bear. I would stand in a favourite corner of the playground, behind a wall, and growl if anyone came near me. I made friends with a group of other weird kids - Rebecca, who had Down's syndrome, and Sarah, who was a nervous wreck because her dad beat up her mum - and looked after them, learning to use my instinctive aggression to keep bullies away.
Being a kid, in suburbia by that time, I didn't have much of a social life outside school. I went to Brownies for a while (mostly so that I could stay up late and watch TV programmes I'd otherwise miss), but I was expelled from it twice, once for blasphemy (putting a 't' at the end of 'God is nigh' - I didn't understand the significance of it, but I thought the Brown Owl's anger was amusing) and once for Playing With Fire. This was during the miners' strikes, so there were often power cuts and we'd do a lot of things by candlelight. I was in my first ever pantomime at Brownies. It was Cinderella. I had a bit part playing a mouse, but I engineered a sort of mouse take-over of the show, and we kept popping up and making jokes when we weren't supposed to, which the audience loved. So, I wasn't very popular with the others after that. Also, I would always want to play football, borrowing without permission the ball which belonged to the scouts, and that was strongly discouraged.
In those days I would walk back to my house along the slow flat roads from the old village, and I would always be looking into the distance, dreaming of what lay beyond. I could frequently see the planet Jupiter hanging in the night sky above my house. I used to fantasise that Jupiter was my real home, and that I was an intelligence which had travelled as a virus to infect a human fetus. It was about that that I wrote my first science fiction stories, at about the age of seven. I used to look at that horizon and long for wings. I would stretch out my arms with my hands in my coat pockets and run hard against the wind, pretending to be a bird. I wanted to fly out of there, to be able to see the place from a great height where it would look small and insignificant in the context of the wider world. I wanted to get beyond, somehow, but I knew that I would have to wait.
Although I enjoyed creative writing at that age, I never had the patience to do very much of it. I was a great fan of John Wyndham, and would persistently write about disasters. I upset a few of my teachers with 'disturbing' (so I'm told) stories about slime which ate everything in its path, and giant slugs whose bite caused the narrator to die from strychnine poisoning, carefully researched and detailed. My favourite of my stories at that time was called The Pound of Carrots on the Underwater Rock, and was a satire about vitamin enriched foods causing an ordinary shark to grow enormous in size and ambition.
Much of my furious creativity came from a shortage, rather than a surfeit, of mental stimulation; I was forced to try and entertain myself using whatever ideas I could get. Although I had books, I felt mentally undernourished in my day to day life; my mind was always hungry. This was at its worst during my periods of illness. Every November, like clockwork, for approximately the first twelve years of my life, I would get ill with catarrh. There was always a little bit of it in my system, but on these occasions it would cause coughing and vomiting. I would be confined to my bed and forbidden to eat for as long as a week (sometimes two on very little food), fed glucose solution to keep me going. What this did to compound my existing eating problems, I don't want to think; but the worst of it was that there would be nothing to do up there. I would often run out of books. I didn't have television, and was only very occasionally allowed the radio. When I was well, I would make up tapes, reading stories to myself and performing short plays, so that I had something to see me through those days of illness; but I was not permitted to play the tapes all the time, as they (apparently) disturbed people. So I sat and boiled in my own thoughts, trying to create interesting stories, wary even then of the kind of introspection which sucks one down into depression.
Eating was a problem even when I wasn't ill; throughout my life, eating has been a problem. I didn't understand how it was so easy for other people. I couldn't swallow food easily, and would have particular problems with dry foods. My parents were distressed by this, but their approach was simply to try and force the same foods into me. They would sit and stare at me for hours as I sat there, after dreaded dinnertime ought to have been over, trying to make the remains of my food go away so that I could escape. They would tell me what a bad person I was - lazy and selfish ("don't you know there are people starving in Cambodia?") and doomed to social exclusion. Stress, of course, made my problems worse. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, I was never taken to a dietitian. No-one seemed to notice that I ate easily when visiting my Gran, whose cooking was tender and moist.
One of my favourite places to escape to, and the place where I was happiest as a child, was my gran's cottage, Staplewood, in South Hampshire, where I spent most of my summers until I was thirteen, and where I also enjoyed a few Christmasses. It was built out of three old Tudor cottages, with a new room added at one end and a verandah on which to take afternoon tea. There was a big lawn with a wonderful herb garden, giant stone mushrooms and a well which my uncle Tim had dug. Off to one side was an old stone bunker which had once been an air raid shelter - the place being situated close to a military base, and therefore in danger during the war - and was latterly used for storing apples. It also made an excellent den. There was a fruit garden for growing berries, all enclosed in huge cages to keep out the birds, but nevertheless they got in and got stuck sometimes, and I can remember my father and my uncles having to rescue them. I always wondered what happened to them when we weren't there.
Staplewood had several outbuildings, including a barn where I used to dig for buried charcoal, and a shed containing old croquet mallets which my brother and I used to chase each other with. We also made bows and arrows from the big willow tree, and used them to scatter wood pigeons from the tops of the pines. Beyond the tamed part of the garden were two big fields bordered by the pines, their banked-up edges riddled with rabbit warrens. One of the fields was an orchard, full of delicious half-wild apples. Sometimes a man would come to shoot the rabbits, and then my brother and I would be warned to stay out of the long grass, because we used to run along the rabbit tracks where we could have been shot by mistake. We would eat the dead rabbits for dinner, as we did with the trout from the nearby brook. I would help my gran cook on the aga, and we would always eat meals at the proper times. She'd been born in Argentina and had travelled the world with my grandfather; she was full of colonial aspirations and believed in following the proper codes appropriate to some quaint archaic aristocracy. Thus I learned how to behave properly at table and which cutlery to use for which food. However, she was rather less successful in persuading me to become a Christian, despite her many attempts. I suspect that's because she never believed in it with the whole of her heart herself, and I had a child's way of seeing that instantly, even though it didn't really register at the time.
It would not be until I was well into adulthood that I realised most people didn't grow up in grand houses like this. Only then did I really think about the strangeness of it all - how the prayerbooks left on my bed and the picture of the Madonna and child above it (even then, I was puzzled as to why they were white) were at odds with the strange religious sculptures and ritual items brought back from Africa and the far eastern spirits and demons which guarded, in doll form, my Uncle John Crocodile's room. My Gran's Christian values sat uneasily with a sort of upper class amorality which casually accepted the appraisal of items probably sacred to their original owners, never mind the dehydrated sea urchins which sat on the bookshelves and the dried baby crocodile hanging from a nail on the dining room wall. As a child, I simply accepted it all, and I found it much harder to relate to the values of suburbia.
My gran had a succession of cats, who were great fun to play with. They would line up corpse presents in the barn and I would return the favour by rescuing them from trees. Sometimes I would spend whole days out in the fields. I often slept there, sheltered under a thatch I made among tree boughs, and I would happily have stayed there at night too if I hadn't been fetched in. I could always find plenty of fruits, roots and grain to feed myself. In the autumn we would have big bonfires, and everything would smell of woodsmoke. Sometimes we would go down the road to visit my friend Betty, a 1920s international women's ice hockey champion, who kept enormous numbers of rescued birds and had a big muddy lake in her garden which we could take a rowing boat out on. There was even an island, though it was covered with nettles and was thus no good for dens. Betty herself was far too proud and complicated for the sedentary life which age had forced her into. She stayed sane by talking to her parrot, read ferociously, and was known, on occasion, to drink far too much gin and initiate a loud chorus of Rule Britannia. It saddened me that I did not actually get to be related to her.
Staplewood was my favourite place in the world, and I was heartbroken when my gran's failing health meant it had to be sold (to people who destroyed it), because she wasn't fit to live there anymore. By then, though, she and I had already fallen out in a permanent kind of way. It's bizarre, really. Of all my blood family, she was probably the one I had the most respect for, because she was the only one as strong willed as me; but that same thing made us incompatible. I'm not the perfectly marriageable passive feminine granddaughter she hoped for, and she wasn't the perfect moral role model she pretended to be, so we parted ways, and I didn't see her for over a decade; and then, seven years ago, she died.
Sometimes in summertime my other grandparents would take me to the seaside, at Scarborough on the north east coast of England, to see my step great grandmother Laura. She had formerly run a guest house, but was weakening by the time I knew her. I liked visiting because the seaside attractions were thrilling to me - arcade machines, which I was rarely allowed to play but liked to watch, were my first experience of bright, colourful computer games; miniature trains were exciting to ride. The beach was covered in colourful pebbles with which to fill pockets. If I was lucky there would be candy floss to eat. It was worth putting up with having my head patted and my face squeezed, the perplexing rituals of the elderly.
My favourite relative, and the only one whom I can honestly say I loved, was my great aunt Greta, sister of my dead grandfather. Greta, it seems, had once been the black sheep of the family, and had run wild in her youth. Latterly she had settled in a town house in Nottingham, surrounded by the things she had collected, myriad treasures of all kinds - fabulous old dolls, impossible jigsaws depicting things like baked beans, old Victorian clockwork machines, gorgeous little silver and glass ornaments, clocks everywhere, and even a carved wooden toboggan in the attic which might as well have had Rosebud painted on it. She was an irascible old creature and all her home helps hated her because she treated them like servants; I got the impression most of our relatives hated her too, and she would often speak of them with venom; but I got through to her. I never saw her as old. She would send me down to the cellar to scare me, or I would run out into the terraced garden and bring back flowers and leaves and tell her what I'd found. She was no longer strong enough to walk to those places herself, but she was strong in her mind, and stronger in her heart. I think that if she had been my age I would probably have fallen in love with her. There was some connection between us that cut through everything else. She adored me and told me I brought a blast of life into her twilight years; in return, she gave me the courage and assurance of someone who had seen it all. I just wish I could have talked with her as an adult, or more that way. There were other questions I should have asked. She died when I was eleven, stuck away in a nursing home where she and I had conspired to murder her bitch of a nurse. I still have her photograph, sepia-tinted and faded with age, showing her in the full bloom of youth, smiling with a complexity which could rival the Mona Lisa. She was always full of secrets.
I met my first boyfriend on my very first day at school, and stuck around him for a long time, till we ended up going out. He seemed bored in the same way as me, but he was full of energy and ideas and we always had a great time. He was smart, and that was such a relief, because I was already beginning to discover that such people were in limited supply. We spent a lot of time reading together. I owe him one for introducing me to Dr. Seuss. He also persuaded the other boys in the school to let me referee their football games, which was a big step forward from not being allowed to participate at all, as they agreed that I didn't seem entirely like a girl. Though his mother loved my blond hair and thought I looked like Heidi, he didn't seem to feel any need to feminise me. He was very pretty himself, Arabic with huge dark brown eyes and thick black hair ("They're always beautiful as children, but they put on weight later and ruin themselves." my mother cautioned), and I fell head over heels in love with him. He was a vivid spot of brightness; the rest of my life faded into insignificance when he was there. I suppose I was young, but it was as strong a passion as any I have ever felt; I guess I was just an early starter, as with so many things, perhaps making up for being late with being born.
That boyfriend left the country when his family moved back to Iraq. We agreed to write, but shortly afterwards Iranian bombs fell on Baghdad, and I never heard from him. I know the chaos afterward could easily have caused letters to be lost, but equally he could've been dead, and I just couldn't handle that. Not knowing left me with an urgent kind of hurt which still isn't entirely healed. I'd never known anyone to die, and I didn't know how to handle that absence. I tried several times to kill myself, but never quite had the courage. I'd read too much Greek tragedy and felt that the only honourable way to do it would be to fall on my knife (which I had surreptitiously obtained whilst assisting with a jumble sale). I slept with that knife under my pillow for two years, waiting for the moment when I could pluck up the courage to use it. So the fact that there's more to this story tells you what a coward I was.
A while after that I met the girl who was to become my first girlfriend. I was very young, but she was only a year older. We didn't even know that what we were doing counted as sex, because no-one had introduced us to the notion of lesbianism, so I'd never even considered that it might constitute a sort of unfaithfulness to my lost love, which would have bothered me a lot at the time (even though no promises had been made between us). I knew male homosexuals existed but I guess I must have had some kind of Queen Victoria-esque sheltered notion that sex was defined by the presence of a penis. All I knew was that it felt good, and I liked it, and so did she; and, although I never loved her, we were close for several years. At that time I also made my first forays into bdsm, also sort of instinctively. I don't think it was related to the abuse I'd suffered. It consisted of entirely different actions, and I never connected the two things in my head at the time. One was about something bad and the other was about something good. They were clearly different.
Feeling that way about women seemed pretty natural, too. After all, I was surrounded by media portrayals of women as sexual creatures, things to be desired and lusted after. Was the world then going to turn round and say "Oh, by the way, that all-pervading message wasn't aimed at you, you just got it by accident"? My mother and her feminist friends used to show me advertisement images of scantily clad women and explain how they were a symptom and tool of the patriarchy. I just thought they were cute.
That was right at the start of the 'eighties, when we were starting to listen to Adam Ant in secret and paint our faces, and I was still mourning for Sid Vicious but finding myself bizarrely distracted by the sight of Marc Almond on Top of the Pops, all wrapped up in chains. I used to go along to the end of my street to keep company with the punks who hung out by the chip shop, sticking safety pins in jumble sale clothes and drinking Tizer, beautiful sleazy soft drink which had so carefully modelled its adverts after anti-heroin campaigns (one of whose stars I later dated). The punks were the first adults - or teenagers, at any rate - who really seemed to treat me as a human being; not as a girl or a queer or a child or an object, but just as me. I always felt really comfortable around them, sort of liberated. We'd eat parma violets and cherry lips and bitch about the government and they'd help me spike my hair, though it always got combed out again for me when I went home.
I identified as a lesbian then, even if I didn't know the actual word - I still loved my first boyfriend, but that felt distant from my later sexual awakenings. I found nothing interesting about the notion of sex with men. It frustrated me that people kept making comments about how I would soon be developing an interest in boys, and taking no notice of me when I tried to explain that I wasn't trying to resist growing up, but rather that I knew of a perfectly viable alternative to boys. This exacerbated the tension which would inevitably have existed between me and the adult world. I was a rebel without a choice.
At the same time, I was losing touch with girls. Friends who had previously been close and wanted to do the same kinds of things as me began to drift away and form single-sex enclaves which revolved around obscure fascinations with Barbie, boys or make-up. They became inscrutable; even their use of language subtly shifted. Sometimes they would let me join in, but it was clear that I was at best a politely tolerated guest. We couldn't relate to each other. Perhaps they were preparing to travel to Venus. I remained an alien Earthling.
The first I really learned about war, beyond the black and white BBC2 distance of World War memories, came with regard to the conflict between Iran and Iraq, and because it was so personal it marked me deeply. I can remember when the Falklands war started; I was camping in a pine forest near Royan, France, and there was a terrific thunderstorm, and I woke up in sudden floods of tears because I couldn't handle my shame at the thought that my country was behaving (as I understood it) in exactly the same manner as Iran and Iraq. It seemed to be an utterly pointless, senseless waste of life, and it filled me with anger. I felt that my opinions on the subject were stifled - that I had no voice with which to protest - because I was a child.
After that night, I lived with a much sharper awareness of the conflicts going on around me, and in particular of the fact that we were living in the nuclear age. I wonder how it will seem to future generations, looking back, the peculiar effects on the psyche of our generation growing up from birth under the threat of nuclear holocaust. Of course, it's happened before, and it'll happen again - it's useful for a government to be able to keep its population in a state of fear whilst appearing heroic. I think Philip K Dick summed it up most impressively in his short story Foster, you're Dead! The effect on children, who have developed no shield of cynicism, is particularly horrific. For many years I really believed that civilisation might be destroyed anytime, and whenever the sky suddenly darkened or grew brighter I would look up and wonder, is this it? Dozens of dramatic cloudscapes are imprinted on my memory. On some level I almost wanted it to happen, to get it over with, to end the agony of anticipation. Was the boy I loved dead? Was I shortly to be dead too? Was there any point to anything? We'd sit at school, learning how to do long division and drawing coloured lines on maps, and nothing made sense.
The Chernobyl incident came shortly after my brother's tenth birthday. We'd celebrated at an outdoor theme park, and I remember my mother crying when she realised we'd been outside all day in that dangerous rain. I think that's when I began to pull myself together, in order to comfort her. She threw out all the vegetables we'd recently bought, as they'd formerly sat outside shops in the rain. I just figured that, since I wasn't dead, I might as well live.
One of the things I am grateful to my parents for is that they gave me alcohol right from when I was a child, in small amounts, sometimes diluted, to drink with meals and that kind of thing. As a result, it never had any mystery for me. I knew what it did and that was no big deal. I never went through any wild teenaged out of control stage of drinking myself into a stupor, throwing up everywhere or ending up in casualty. As best I can recall, I have only thrown up after alcohol three times, and on each of those occasions I was slightly ill with 'flu or something similar. The worst it usually does to me is to cause dehydration the following day, so I just have to remember to drink lots of water.
Holidays in France also made drinking - especially wine - seem like a very ordinary, unglamourous thing, as there was always wine with meals there, and there were no peculiar social rules about keeping it away from children. I remember a particularly good 'eat and drink as much as you like' party at a creperie when I was about nine, where I ate twelve crepes and drank a bottle and a half of good red wine, and my friend Andrew, the same age, ate fifteen crepes and drank three bottles of wine. We were just fine. It was my poor brother, after three bottles of lemonade, who spent the entire night on the toilet.
When I was eleven, and in training (for swimming), my extreme physical fitness and fast metabolism meant that I could put away more alcohol than at any other time in my life. I used to engage in drinking competitions with straight vodka against several adults in a row at parties and barbecues, and have them all falling under the table. The only difference I really noticed afterwards was that the standard of my tennis suffered considerably, though I never was very good at it to begin with. I can never get the hang of those games where a missile is approaching and one is supposed to hit it. My instinct is always to duck or run away.
One of the scariest early experiences in my life came during a camping holiday in France (of which there were many), when my parents had left me to mind my brother while they went for a walk along the clifftop. My brother was climbing on a huge piece of rock, like an outcropping of cliff which had got cut off from the main part, in the middle of the beach. He fell off it and smashed his head open. We ran round the rock screaming to get attention. I think he would've died if an old local woman hadn't rushed to his aid and strapped towels round his head to stop the bleeding. He was rushed to an emergency medical centre while everyone demanded to know where our parents were, and in my limited French I did my best to explain. We ran up to the clifftop, but there were two paths leading in different directions, and of course it turned out my parents had taken the other one. I ran along one of them for hours searching, but eventually had to give up and go back to the town. There I was lucky enough to run into my father by accident, though by that point he already knew what had happened to Tom. We were lucky, and Tom was okay, though he needed stitches and he had a crimson antibiotic applied to his head that made the wound look even more spectacular.
I was all the more shaken by that incident because I'd dreamed something similar the night before - about him climbing, and falling. When I mentioned this to my mother she told me I must be remembering wrong, but I knew it was true because I'd written it down in my Junior Eurocamp holiday diary (dreams being the most exciting thing to write about after long slow days sitting in a tent). After that I distrusted my dreams for a long time, afraid that they might come true, or, worse, that by having them I might cause bad things to happen.
Tom was far more relaxed about it all. His crimson head wound impressed girls. Suddenly everyone wanted to play tennis with him. I spent the next few days playing by myself in an empty field, studying insects and flowers, catching crickets, and dreamily eating poppy seeds. The scent of the wild flowers warned of a disappearing age. Carefully, I rescued their roots from the drifting sand, but the wind would always blow it back again.
I was born with a squint in my right eye. Not a bad one, just something which my parents noticed occasionally and feared would put off boys when I got older. They were advised to put me in for a cosmetic operation to correct it. I didn't want to go through with it, but I wasn't given much choice. As it turned out, they were lied to, and the success rate was much lower than the doctors had implied, the complication rate much higher. I don't know what was going on with all that, I just knew that as far as I was concerned my eyes worked fine and I didn't want anybody messing about with them.
I had that first operation when I was nine. The tendon behind the eye was shortened. It was shortened too much. As a result I had persistent double vision throughout the following year. I remember that when I first opened my eyes after the blood had been cleaned away (it matts eyelashes together) and the muscles had stopped cramping, everything sort of pixelated. I went home and tried to watch Multi Coloured Swapshop, but it was like looking through a kaleidoscope on acid.
When I was eleven I had a second operation to correct the mistake of the first by inserting a small piece of nylon into the shortened tendon. That did make things better, but my vision in that eye has never been as good as before the first operation. Sometimes I have difficulty seeing in three dimensions properly, as when I get tired my left eye tends to take over and do most of the work. I have a sort of secondary depth perception system based on light and contrast, but it's a lot less use at night. 'Magic eye' pictures reveal nothing to me, and bendy computer screens designed to set one's focus at infinity make me feel physically sick.
Just before that second operation, I experienced a fit of panic - not quite fear, more like an expression of all the anger which had built up at things being done to my body without my consent. I knew I had to go through with it, but I just wanted to scream. I dropped my small seal, Kotick, who was to accompany me into the operating theatre. He was retrieved for me by a boy of thirteen who could hardly see at all after blasting himself in the face whilst trying to make fireworks at home. The boy said nothing, but placed Kotick back in my arms and just gently touched my hand, and it meant the world to me to know then that he understood, that someone understood at least a fraction of my pain. After that, I understood something of what bravery is about, and what it is for.
Being blind for the few days following each operation was an interesting experience, and cured my childhood fear of the dark completely. The staff at the hospital wanted to push me everywhere in a wheelchair, but I refused to be treated like an invalid. Hospitals are noisy places and it was easy enough to navigate by sound. I learned to do pretty much everything for myself anyway. I learned to have more confidence in my other senses.
I used to think that my particular problem with photosensitivity was the result of teenaged opium abuse, but my mother has assured me that I've been that way since birth. I've always had oversized pupils and been easily dazzled by bright lights. Light can easily cause me real pain. It's awkward, since I'm a goth, and a lot of people assume I react like that out of some misguided attempt to be cool, so they think it's something to play with. I have to be careful with daylight, especially in summer, when I wear UV-protective shades almost all the time, otherwise my eyes dry out and become red and bruised and difficult to open. Every now and then this gets so bad that I just have to keep them closed for a day or so, usually by tying something over them so that the temptation to open them in sudden surprise or suchlike is removed. It's very useful, at these times, to know how to get around as a blind person. I miss the net, though.
Growing up as the daughter of South Yorkshire's several times small bore rifle target shooting champion, I guess it was inevitable that sooner or later I would start shooting. My father first took me to a range when I was twelve. I was fairly small and found the rifles too awkward to handle, but I was okay shooting two-handed with a pistol. My father was impressed that I managed to hit the target at all (three out of six times at 50 yards) on my first go, as he said that's pretty unusual. I still have my first target as a souvenir. It was an activity where having a tendency to focus with just one eye became a positive advantage. I never was amazing at it, though, probably due to my naturally poor co-ordination, My brother was much better, and for a while I think he was getting involved in competitions and things. I stopped going to the range, as I was too busy with other things, but it's something I enjoyed learning, and I'd like to try it again.
Latterly I've played laserquest games and that kind of thing, but it's really not the same, as there's no recoil, the sighting on the guns is always dreadful and it just generally gets me into bad habits; besides which, it's full of obnoxious pre-teens with a rather different understanding of fair play. After one of The Predator costumes was obtained by the local venue, certain children would persistently shelter behind their alien friend, crying out "Kevin, Kevin, save us!"
When I moved into secondary school I was determined that my life should be different and that I should handle things better, especially socially, so that I could get by more smoothly and pass the time for long enough to get my qualifications and get the Hell out of there. Of course, it didn't work. I guess these things never do. Bullies, at any age, can spot insecurity a mile off, and home in on it. I did what I was supposed to. I wore trainers. I saved up and bought second-hand 'split skirts' from the market and pretended they were new. I obsessed about George Michael (ah, how splendidly ironic it seems today!); but still they had me marked out as a lesbian. Well, I guess they would've thought even 'worse' if I'd claimed to like Andrew Ridgely. ;) Most people didn't take their allegations seriously, but 'lesbian' to them was just another term for 'loser', and I was intelligent too, so they had to think of some reason to hate me. I had a policy of non-violence, though I wasn't always so good at avoiding confrontation. One thing which I suspect bugged them was that I treated the teachers exactly as I'd treat anyone else - politely, but with absolutely no special deference; as equals. Some of the teachers resented that too, and did their best to get in my way academically, but as I expected school life to hurt, in the end there wasn't that much they could do. I walked out a couple of times and made it clear that if there was a next time I'd take other people with me. They didn't know how to intimidate me out of that, so they stopped bothering me.
Despite my best efforts, things sometimes got physical, and I was in a few fights whilst at school. It was one of the early ones which affected me most. It started in a lunch queue, ended up with me and a wee ned guy wrestling on a pathway next to rosebushes and atop broken glass. Very suddenly, all of my emotional focus seemed to disappear, and I found myself thinking extremely fast, clearly and coldly. I realised how easy it would be to pick up a piece of the glass and stick it in my opponent's eyes or throat; how easy it would be to kill him. I knew the exact moves I would have to make to do it, and I also knew that, once begun, the course of action would continue until he was dead. The thought of killing him didn't bother me in the slightest. I was shocked by my discovery of this part of myself, so I just lay still and let him hit me, because any less serious reaction seemed silly. I realised that I was too physically weak to administer a beating, but that I could kill. Later, the fact I hadn't cared came to bother me a great deal. I tried to avoid similar situations for fear of it happening again.
The worst incident of confrontation between myself and school staff came after a substitute teacher had suffered some kind of panic attack when trying to manage my geology class. I hadn't done anything to provoke this, and had tried to politely look the other way; I did feel sorry for the young woman, though I also felt that she shouldn't be doing that job if she couldn't cope with the mild hassle she'd received from some elements in the class, and I also felt some measure of blame was due to the people who had placed her in that position when she clearly wasn't up to it. However, the way the school dealt with the whole business was dreadful. They pulled the whole class into a room and threatened us all with suspension and 'a permanent black mark on your records' if we didn't apologise for harrassing the teacher. This included my friend Yvette, who hadn't even been present when the incident occurred; she tried to be meek and give in to them but, rightly or wrongly, I stood up for her, and refused to discuss the matter until they had let her go. They then insisted that we all apologise. I explained that the teacher had my sympathy, but that I was not prepared to apologise for something I hadn't done, as that was tantamount to lying, and I was disgusted that they should expect me to lie. They became very threatening, and I was quite scared, as I knew I was quite alone, with all the others in the class resenting my stance - the teachers tried to blackmail me by threatening that the others would be punished if I didn't give in. I was very upset by the whole thing, but I stood my ground, and I said I was prepared to discuss it in a court if necessary, and eventually they backed down until a compromise was reached. Of course, that didn't stop a lot of people from hating me afterwards, but I think that was better than me hating myself as I would have done had I not stood up for what I felt was right.
There were things I liked about school. I had a few good friends there, mostly comprising other 'undesirables'. I had access to an 'animal club' where we could take care of hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs and a rabbit named Halifax, and sometimes I got to take them home at weekends, which was wonderful, as I'd always longed for a pet like that. I had fish, but although I loved them dearly I needed something I could hug. I also had access to some simple lab equipment which I could occasionally obtain at lunchtimes to use in my own experiments. And I learned basic woodwork and metalworking skills, which I loved. I went to extracurricular classes for my woodwork, and also to learn Spanish. I always loved languages and dreamed of being fluent in several (which I'm not, but I later studied linguistics to make up for it).
I first slept with a man when I was about thirteen or fourteen. Up until then, I had mostly been surrounded by adolescent boys, who were never appealing; but the discovery of older males (on holiday) was something of a revelation. The sex wasn't amazing, but it was something I was ready to try again. I liked the fact that the holiday situation gave me the freedom to experiment without commitment being necessary (especially as he was Dutch, so I was unlikely ever to run into him again). It gave me a new perspective on my sexuality. I was always totally relaxed about it on a personal level, and never confused, but I think that's mostly because I didn't give it much thought. I had never in my life heard of anybody else who was attracted to both women and men (or at any rate, I hadn't paid attention). It just seemed obvious and natural.
I went on a trip to Germany from school. It was an exchange programme, and my friend Steffi came to stay with me too. Steffi was dazzlingly beautiful, with the kind of easy charm which French movie directors make a fortune from pointing their cameras at. She smouldered when she walked in the room. I was ridiculously scared of accidentally falling for her, so I kept my distance a little, which was a shame, as I guess we could've been firmer friends. Anyhow, I found a German boy to have a crush on instead, and of course that went nowhere. I felt like this little geeky thing whom most people were never going to interested in. I enjoyed the trip, though, as it gave me more independence and proved (most importantly to me, myself) that I was capable of doing such things without my family there to look after me.
I loved the endless trees and sky-swallowing mountains of the Schwarzwald. No picture ever quite seems to capture its beauty. The brightness of blue lakes glimpsed through pines two hundred feet beneath. The distant shimmer of the snow white Alps. The rich smells of fertile earth and forest, clear streams running through it, the sweetest water I ever tasted: these are the tiny tinkling movements at the start of The Blue Danube. For me, that place will always be associated with the deep, dark flavour of morello cherries on its famous cake, dry white wines, the rattle of trams over cobbles, clock shops whose visitors flee at noon, the terror of scaling steep bright waterfalls and hillsides whose grey crosses detail those known to have fallen to their deaths. It's a landscape which mocks supposed human supremacy, even though the tops of the trees have been stained brown by acid rain. It says: this was here before you, and this will be here long after you are gone.
When I was small I was phobic of the water, scared even to stand near the edge of a river or the sea. I was scared for myself, and also, by proxy, for Lambsey, a soft white lamb whom I'd stolen from my brother and took everywhere with me; I kept thinking that she might somehow fall from my arms. I think I picked up the phobia from my mother, though to her credit she did her best to hide it from me, along with her fear of spiders, which it was my duty to carry outdoors. I decided it was no way to live, anyhow, so I must do something about it: and when I was seven, I started swimming lessons.
It was tough at first. I got so scared before the big moment came for going in the deep end without a float that twice I got sick and couldn't do it. The third time, though, I managed to relax, and something changed. Suddenly it was easy. All my fear vanished in an instant. I realised that I could take care of myself in water, and move any way I wanted to, and I absolutely loved it. I never looked back.
I devoted most of my free evenings thereafter to practice, collecting all the major distance swimming awards and training in life saving. I had to use the latter skills to fish a friend out of a lake in Germany. Since this involved shocking some sense into her, she greatly resented it afterwards, but I didn't really mind, because at least she was okay and I knew I'd handled things correctly. I think by then I had begun to realise that risking danger for people usually tends to have a negative effect on any attempts to win their friendship.
Latterly I trained to swim competitively in races (mostly breast stroke), and I was good for my height, but I never got tall enough to be a professional. I still think it was good for me, because it vastly improved my co-ordination, it taught me a lot about self discipline and it left me with a good strong underlying muscle structure which later enabled me to tone up again fairly easily, even after my periods of malnutrition. I still love swimming, and it amazes me how easily I fall back into the old disciplines after long breaks.
I've drowned three times in my life. The first time was when I was two or three, and I was wandering around bored in a baby pool. I got so dizzy going in circles that I started spinning downwards. I can remember how pretty the bright blue water looked above me, with a trail of little silvery bubbles spiralling up towards the surface. I wasn't scared then; I was happy. My mother fished me out and knocked the water out of my lungs. I guess it scared her quite a lot.
The later times were both after my training had commenced. One happened on a holiday camp when I dived into an outdoor plunge pool I'd assumed was heated only to discover it was just below freezing (it hadn't iced over as it hadn't been disturbed). Uh oh. Dumb move. As the back of my head went under my body went into the shock that preceeds hypothermia. I recognised it at once, and although the water was already in my lungs I knew what to do, and managed to catapult myself back to the surface and roll out of the water in one move. Otherwise, it could easily have been fatal. No-one was watching.
The last such incident occurred when I dived too far and too hard off a board and banged my head off the bottom. The shock of the unexpected impact knocked all the air out of me, and cost me a few seconds in which I lost my balance, which is of crucial importance in these situations. I knew instantly that I didn't have enough oxygen to get back to the top. The body learns to measure these things. So I steeled myself and took two long breaths of water. Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to extract oxygen from water - in fact, there's more oxygen in water than in air - it's just that water is too heavy for the lungs to process for more than two or three breaths. The diaphragm isn't strong enough. However, those two breaths gave me the strength for one hard kick and a few carefully measured arm movements which got me back to the surface. I was never scared. The water doesn't hurt when it goes into lungs half as much as it does when it comes out. It's surfacing that's the icky bit. The water is sleepy and soft and such a beautiful blue, an alluring resting place. The air is harsh and bright and painful. I suspect it's somewhat akin to the experience of being born.
On the 25th of November 1987, when we were both thirteen years old, my friend Sheree died from inhaling lighter fluid.
Everything seemed to stop short at that. Life came into focus. Sheree had been the only other person in my class who had seemed to me to have any ambition, any real direction in life. She was carving out a successful early career as a model, and though we often failed to see eye to eye, I think we both respected one another's strength of character. There had been times when her presence, with her determination and willingness to be different, had meant a great deal to me, like an assurance that I wasn't alone. Then suddenly she was gone. I knew how frustrated she'd been. I knew how often I'd felt the same way. I think my life could have gone two ways at that point; I could have given in to the urge for self destruction, or I could have fought. It was that morning, sitting in the cold grey classroom where I first heard what had happened, that I decided to fight. I had never before been so single minded about anything. She'd died, and I wasn't going to let life do that to me.
I owe you, Sheree. And I still have the autograph you signed for me so that it would be worth money when you became a star.
A year later, I experienced my first major manifestation of illness. I should note at this point that I had, on some level, often wanted to be ill. I struggled to eat properly, I was often inexplicably exhausted, and I envied those who could label such problems in a way which attracted sympathy rather than condemnation. But when illness finally happened to me, I got very little sympathy from anyone; many people simply wouldn't believe me. At school, those who found out about it mocked me. Even my father once expressed doubt at the severity of what was happening to me, which was the closest I ever came to hitting him. Whatever I might have thought I wanted, I didn't want this.
One night that winter I woke up in the middle of the night because the bed felt damp and cold around me; then I realised I was lying in a pool of blood. My own blood. I didn't know what had happened. I just started screaming (as I imagine most people would; or something similar, anyway). My mother came and helped me to clean myself up. We went to the doctor the next day. I'd started my period three years previously. It couldn't suddenly change like that, could it? Unfortunately, yes, it could. As far as I know, it hasn't changed back. The bleeding just didn't stop. For two and a half years I was losing as much as two pints a month, and I was only small, I didn't have terribly much in me to begin with. I was anaemic all the time, tired and bruised and struggling to concentrate on things. For one week out of every four, the bleeding was so heavy that I couldn't walk. I was constantly visiting gynaecologists, who said it was an unusual problem, but that they'd seen a few similar cases. I tried eight different pills. I even had an operation. Nothing worked.
In the hospital before my operation I kept pictures of my friends and of the girl I adored. Everyone assumed it was the boys I was drooling over. I was given a hospital dressing gown, told I couldn't walk around in just my long Wham! t-shirt because "There are men in here!" All the other women were over sixty, and they kept on saying how "it must be easier for the young ones" and discussing the way they felt about strangers pawing over their bodies. It was true, I didn't have any of their hang-ups, but only because I had no expectation of personal privacy, that part of me having been broken long before. I submitted to all the indignities of treatment with only a sort of dull and distant pain. It was only when they asked about my sex life that I was afraid, somehow still unable to admit to a stranger that I wasn't heterosexual. What did it matter, anyway, I wondered? I was in no state to conduct a relationship with anybody now.
There were months of visiting doctors, waiting two hours to see a specialist who would prod at me, exhibit me to gawping students, then discuss me in hushed whispers with colleagues, pointing and staring. I don't know how much they figured out then that they didn't tell me, but they frequently ignored my requests for information. I felt at once that I was an object of scientific curiosity and that I was of no concern to them at all. My psychological experience was irrelevant.
The situation caused me to despair. For years my only aim in life had been to get the grades which would get me to university, and thus provide me with a concrete, financially viable plan for getting out of that town. When I got ill, it began to look as if I might never be able to live on my own. I begged the doctors to give me a hysterectomy, but of course they wouldn't, on account of my age and the condition not actually being life threatening, though it felt like a slow death. I often wanted to die because of it. Aside from everything else, I felt filthy, and I was no longer able to block out related memories of abuse.
In some ways, I guess some good came out of it, because being immobile for that amount of time gave me nothing much else to do but sit down and write. I finally found a way to relieve my boredom. I finally learned to discipline myself so that I could not only write but also edit; so that as well as ideas I could master structure and develop the patience to finish what I started. I wrote my first novel when I was fourteen. I don't think it was anything brilliant (though some people liked it), but it was a milestone for me, as, after I'd once pushed myself past that elusive forty thousand word mark, writing long things suddenly became easy. I suddenly knew that I could do it. I discovered a real passion for writing, and I also discovered that people wanted to read it.
At that point in my life I also figured that it was time to stop sitting around being hurt and time to make an effort to get some good things in my life. Since its world championship was held in my town, I went to watch a couple of snooker matches, just for something to do at first, and there I made new friends. It was a huge surprise to discover what having friends like that could be like - friends from an entirely different social circle, who knew nothing of the way I was treated at school and weren't going to judge me on my past. I also made friends from other cities, which opened up the opportunity to travel and go visiting, and suddenly the world seemed much bigger. This became a regular social thing. Sport is a strange business to get close to, a sort of a soap opera in which one's friends are continually and deliberately pitted against one another for things that mean a great deal to them, or for their very livelihoods, and for that reason it can be emotionally tough, but fine friendships can be formed in adversity. There were silly crushes and petty rivalries and a great deal of drinking and silliness, and all in all I think it was good for me.
Being around celebrity also provided valuable learning experiences, as I was increasingly being asked to talk to the press myself, and I needed to see how other people handled it. Probably the most notorious in those circles at that time was David Icke, then a snooker commentator, whom most of my friends strongly disliked because of his habitual rudeness, though I was later to discover that he suffered from chronic pain and was probably coping as well as he could. Everything changed for him when he obtained new painkillers; not only did he become a nice person overnight, he also announced, in front of all the cameras, that he was a new prophet with messages from Heaven, that the holy colours were orange and turquoise, and that he was going off to marry two women and establish a colony on the Isle of Wight. Naturally, we were all somewhat taken aback. I was impressed at the boldness of it, wishing I had the guts to be open about my own beliefs like that. Although I had obtained a social life, I still wasn't really operating as myself.
Around that time, I experienced that moment of self awareness which I suppose most teenagers go through. My hair had grown blonder, and I'd had it cut after the fashion of the punks I'd always admired. I'd started to choose my own clothes, and my body had developed sudden curves all by itself. People started to buy me drinks, take me to expensive champagne dinners and look at me in a whole new way. I was quite taken aback. I guess I'd always wanted that kind of attention, but I'd imagined it to be completely outwith my grasp. I guess that the way things were going, I could've married a millionaire. Shame the one I liked best was a woman. But then, having suddenly discovered a power I didn't know I had, I wasn't about to settle down in a hurry.
Of course, there's always a flip side. I was attacked for the first time as an adult whilst I was on holiday with two friends from that scene. We'd come back from a club and were relaxing in our flat when four drunken guys appeared at the door and insisted we go to their place to share a few drinks. I tried to refuse, but the others agreed eagerly, so I felt obliged to accompany them. Gin was passed around and they were soon completely plastered. I pretended to be more drunk than I was, spilled most of mine and threw some of it at a friend. They didn't notice I wasn't really drinking. One of them had one of my friends, a very pretty but rather fragile girl, down on a couch and was trying to pull off her clothes. I knew there was no way I could handle the situation physically, so instead I flirted with that guy, and with the others, and suggested we go out onto the balcony where it would be 'more romantic'. They did so, and I grabbed my friend and ran, carrying her, back along the terrace to my own flat. I threw her inside and my other friend dragged her into the bathroom whilst I tried to push the door shut. I screamed for my friends to come and help me, but they locked themselves in the bathroom and left me on my own. I guess I must have been pumped full of adrenaline, because I held that door on my own, against four of them, for several minutes, but I couldn't quite get it closed enough to turn the key. Eventually, my strength gave out, and they burst in. Of course, they were furious at my deception, and I was terrified, but I thought quickly and burst out laughing, like it had all been a big joke. I managed to get them laughing too, then I backed off into the kitchen area and got a carving knife to hold behind my back. They were there for two hours, openly discussing raping me, trying to figure out how to get to the others. I kept them talking and laughing, playing them off against each other, sometimes even kissing them, but making sure that their aggression turned against one another rather than against me. All the while I clutched the knife, calculating the precise moves necessary to plunge it into the stomach of the nearest guy and pull it upwards, to empty his guts on the floor. I knew that had to be a last resort, because after that I would have no chance of negotiating with the others, and I would probably lose a fight against three of them, even if I were armed. One of them, however, was more sober than the others, and nervous, and clearly didn't want to be there. I got him to be my ally, and carefully talked things around, with his help, until they ended up leaving. It was almost dawn then. I locked the door and collapsed against it.
Those friends later drifted away. One of them seemed resentful of me; I wondered if it was because she remembered those events better than she pretended to, and felt guilt at having abandoned me to my fate. It got difficult for me to be around them in the long term, anyway, because they could both be homophobic sometimes, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable keeping my sexuality a secret, especially when it was attacked.
I've always seemed to attract more than my fair share of stalkers and would-be abusers, even when I've dressed and behaved in a very dull, ordinary way. Maybe it's being blond that does it. Maybe because of my small, slender build I look like an easy victim. I remember when I was fourteen, almost fifteen, I'd been to try and see the Pet Shop Boys' movie It Couldn't Happen Here at the cinema, but they'd put the prices up unexpectedly, so I couldn't afford it, and I went back to the bus station, disappointed, to wait for my ride home. Some slimy guy came over and spent half an hour trying to pick me up, though I mostly ignored him. When he asked my age and I told him he was shocked, and said he'd assumed I was ten or eleven. I felt an incredible surge of rage at that - at the thought that he was looking for some kid that vulnerable to pick on. I launched into him verbally, but the bus arrived then, so I didn't quite get round to tearing his eyes out. I don't know whether he deserved quite that much hatred or not - I never knew enough to judge - but I became aware then that there are some buttons people should just not push with me, because I have no doubt that this rage I carry could kill.
I got involved in a lot of other things around that time; principally politics. I joined the Labour party a week before it was technically legal for me to do so, and I threw myself into constituency work, and did a lot of stuff alongside my local councillors, grateful for the introduction to the processes of local and national government. I wanted to learn politics from the inside out. I had a hunger for it. I also worked with CND for a while, before the two became incompatible. And I joined SOS Rascism, a group campaigning against rascist activity in the city; I worked on their committee and got my first experience in journalism editing their magazine. I learned a lot of practical skills and 'people skills' which gave me more confidence in myself. The interminable nature of grassroots political meetings taught me to be an assertive and efficient manager, driving things forward being the only way to get anything done. I believe that many people who attend such meetings don't expect to get things done; nor even, really, intend to. Attendance itself is sufficient fulfilment of ideological duty, sufficient salve to the conscience. I would keep observing opportunities to act and achieve, and nobody quite knew what to do with me.
When I was sixteen I went to 'Socialist Summer Camp' with friends from a trade union group, which was bizarre. They thought they could educate me about Marxism, which was silly, as I'd read all that stuff years before (first hand, not just cribbed from Lenin) and given it a lot more thought than most of them appeared to have done. I, in turn, wanted to understand their thoughts and behaviour patterns for a novel I was writing. It turned out to be a rough week. The 'food budget' was blown in one night, so I was left with nothing to eat for a week but for a packet of ginger biscuits and a lettuce, and what berries I could find. My little tent would have been warm enough, but had no inner lining to cover its door, so the rain came in, night after night, and I was wet and freezing cold while trying to sleep. People seemed constantly to be trying to mould my thoughts, in a way which was at times almost cult-like (which saddened me, as I agreed with many of their tenets, if not always with the practice) - it even went so far as a couple of people trying to fix me up with a guy whom I overheard them saying might be able to win me over. I guess he would have been thought by most to be good looking, but he was very far from my type. Maybe if I'd been drunk, and he'd worn a nice dress... At one point, made desperate by hunger and cold, I tried to hitch a lift into the nearby town of Gloucester, but was unsuccessful. Lucky for me. That was the time and location in which the serial killers Fred and Rosemary West were looking for young female hitchhikers, though no-one would know so till much later.
As it was, I stuck things out. I would sneak off alone into the forest at night and make my shelter beneath the trees. I liked to look up at the vast unspoiled arc of star filled sky beyond. Even long before I knew about the seventeenth card of the Tarot, the stars were a source of hope and emotional renewal to me.
In early 1988 I travelled to Moscow along with a group of people from my school's sixth form. This was in the dying days of the Cold War, when 'glasnost' and 'perestroika' were the big buzzwords. At that time, I knew little other Russian, but found my German surprisingly useful; many young people learned it in order to communicate with petty criminals from East Germany who smuggled chewing gum and designer jeans. Foreign clothing, obvious though it was (and not likely to endear one to the authorities) was at a premium; whilst I was there, an English public schoolboy staying in my hotel swapped his jeans for a soldier's greatcoat, after which the soldier had to be tracked down so the deal could be reversed before he was court-martialled.
The trip to Russia was my first experience in an aeroplane, quite something in itself. We had clear weather most of the way, so I was able to look down at the assorted fields and settlements and rivers of Europe, and at the barren red islands in the polluted Baltic. Airport security was complex and paranoid, but didn't bother me much; I refused to be nervous like my companions, and smiled and chatted, as a result of which everyone was friendly and helpful to me. I was also satisfyingly distracted by the beautiful architecture of Moscow Airport, sunk in two metres of snow. At that time it was forbidden to photograph it, so I stored it all in memory: the exquisite stone-panelled ceilings, the long elegant windows, the marble floors. A whole different approach from Heathrow, with its anonymous cubes of steel and glass. Every public building in Russia had been subject to the same care, which prompted critics to say it was old-fashioned and accuse it of robbing the public purse. On closer investigation, however, much of it had been inherited from the old Tsarist regime or had been created by volunteers impassioned by the revolution. There was still, in that place, a spirit of genuine love of the country by its people which I have rarely encountered elsewhere. It is different from flag-waving nationalism. It is a love which acknowledges and exists despite failure of government and fortune. It manifests in an extraordinary cultural warmth, though the air temperature at that time was minus forty Celsius.
Saddled as I was with the company of strangers who considered themselves responsible for me, I was limited in my explorations, but it's the little things which give away the real nature of a place. Gold domes glittered right across to the horizon, yet electrical appliances sparked when plugged in. The television played propaganda newsreels, intellectual science fiction films and the best children's cartoons I've ever seen. The tap water was proudly proclaimed to be safe to drink, but came out of the tap white and unpleasant to the taste; I became more aware of the different priorities of poverty. Russian food was simple and cheap but always excellent; the best food anywhere is that cooked by the poor, who have to make the best of their ingredients. That said, I must confess that I was not prepared to eat it all. The local fondness for salted mineral water was particularly perplexing to me. We drew lots to see who would test each bottle of water (it wasn't labelled, in any language), as we did to see who would open the brass-framed doors set at intervals down hotel corridors lined with nylon carpets. I got my share of shocks.
Trips around the city showed me more of day to day life, and I did a bit of shopping, though I was disappointed not to be able to get to Moscow's main record shop, as I was a keen listener to Russian rock music impossible to obtain at home. Many were the days I'd spent twiddling my radio dial and spinning the aerial around to catch a static-clouded burst of Soviet punk. Of course, my contemporaries over there were doing the same thing, wanting Western rock. At that time, they had only recently become aware of the death of Elvis. Eager for news from one another, we conversed in bad German whenever we could, on street corners and in museums (where I saw many relics of the early Russian space programme) or, at night, beneath illuminated St. Basil's in Red Square. My room-mate was secretly screwing someone else on the trip, so she wasn't around to see me sneak out of the hotel late at night to meet up in a subway with a soldier I was particularly fond of. Alors, mon coeur ç'est d'Écosse, mais ma con est internationale.
During those years, I continued to be an avid reader of science fiction, and I began to get more involved in the scene which supports the literature, films and so forth. My first forays were to Dr. Who exhibitions held in Sheffield city centre. I met lots of genuinely interesting people there, and gained access to new materials and information; but it was the sort of environment where one might easily believe few of the attendees had seen breasts before (even clothed; and mine, of course, only attracted more attention for being clothed in leather). I was pursued by amorous daleks and a number of hopeless young men; I attempted awkwardly to forge friendships in the face of unrequited lust. It was a learning experience, I suppose. It didn't help me to recognise more subtle flirtation. When, later, I started attending conventions in other cities, I missed out on a couple of opportunities which I really would have liked to pursue with certain television stars. One of the problems was that I was still nervous about getting in trouble for accidentally hitting on straight women, so I tended to ignore subtle lesbian interest; and I was still unconvinced about my ability to interest people much older than me, whom I found more psychologically attractive, despite having slept with one woman of 'thirty nine' (I suspect many people go on saying that for years), and being aware on a rational level of the fuss made about youth.
Attending conventions also proved beneficial to my career. I started meeting editors who took an interest in my short stories, and I found out a lot more about what it that editors want (besides another brandy). Supported by an enthusiastic English teacher at college, I got my first short story published at the age of sixteen. Entitled Reflections, it was a surrealist piece about growing up and about the decay of civilisations, couched in pretty metaphors which I knew would go down well. I was learning how to write for other people - something which every author must eventually come to terms with before, if sie is worth anything at all, abandoning it and recovering the ability to write from the heart.
I was very much involved in the campaign against the institution of the Poll Tax in the UK, from the time of its passing as law in Scotland, and I went on a lot of demonstrations against it. I never believed in 'us against them', and I sold more than one policeman a sticker which he claimed was 'for [his] sister' or suchlike. To be fair, though, I guess I had a few limits. On the bus on the way down to the famous Trafalgar Square demonstration, I chatted to an attractive, slender girl a couple of years younger than me, wondering if she might be up for slipping away from her parents later on; but they were friendly too; and, when we got off the bus, they unfurled banners proclaiming 'Former Tory Voters Against the Poll Tax'. I made my excuses and left. After getting lost in the chaos of that day, delayed awhile talking to a pretty young anarchist who turned up dead on the front page of my morning paper five years later, I was rescued by a goth couple who'd noticed me on account of my purple coat. The police were trying to stop people getting into the square by blocking off the ends of all the roads to it, but no-one had any warning of this further back, and everyone was getting crushed into a smaller and smaller space, being struck at with batons as they crossed the line. I was particularly horrified on account of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster having occurred in my home town just two years earlier. Luckily, my new friends and I were able to escape over a wall and through some gardens. I saw the horses trample people that day. I saw a woman go down, bloody, under their hooves. I never believed the media when they said that no-one was killed.
"This'll be like Woodstock or the Marquee in '77." I told my new-found friends, to comfort them, as we lay by the roadside later, unable to get to our bus. "Everyone will want to claim they were here." Oddly enough, that's rather how it is, in some circles. I later dated a woman who did the whole thing on LSD and recalls standing on scaffolding laughing as three foot high police officers tried to rush her. We eventually got a bus which was passing our town on its way elsewhere to give us a free ride home. Until then, a brief stint of homelessness in London had looked like it was on the cards. And I had not expected to be physically capable of coping with it. See, my bleeding was expected to start that day. I knew it was a risk when I went, but it meant so very much to me, I took my chances. Turns out that was the day my life turned around. It was a pharmacist, not a doctor, who had suggested the new pill, taking pity on me after my gynaecologist screwed me over one more time; I figure that pharmacist saved my life. I have stayed on that pill ever since, and I have never again bled the way I used to do. That day, I became free.
For my sixteenth birthday, my mother took me to Paris to celebrate at the festivities for the Bicentenaire de la Révolution. Paris is a wonderful city, one of the few I feel at home in, whether quiet and contemplative in the great dark cave that is Notre Dame or excited and vivacious climbing a slender tree beside the Champs Elysées to watch an international parade. Of course, at that time, it was very crowded, but things were probably easier for me than for most, as people made a great fuss of me on account of it being my birthday then, and even gave me presents. At other times I found myself the centre of attention because of my appearance, which seems silly in Paris somehow, but it wasn't my dresses or make-up, it was my hair. It seems that the spikes were far more obviously a punk thing in that place. In the metro, things got scary sometimes, with people throwing lit fireworks into the middle of the sardine-packed crowds, but I found myself on the margins, and so I encountered the punks who hang around there - some of them live there, in the myriad other interconnecting tunnels beneath the city's surface. I saw only a little of it, and was invited to explore further, but unfortunately my freedom was limited on account of my mother's presence. I did, however, meet a beautiful German Anna, whose hair was pillarbox red, her personality not dissimilar. She wanted me to look her up in Berlin sometime, but I never did get round to it. Sometimes I wonder if she'd still remember me. A kiss, after all, is just a kiss.
My principal impressions of Paris at that time were that it was a liberal city and a chaotic one; it gave me early indications that such might be a necessary compromise in my own life. Also, it has many patisserie shops, which is a good thing. I have fond memories of lazing in the sun on the steps of the old opera house with a chocolate eclair, casually fending off the advances of the Columbian sailors whom for some reason I kept meeting everywhere; of wandering along tiny, twisting backstreets full of wonderful toymakers' shops; of buying my guillotine earrings by the Tuilleries; of being asked politely please not to climb in the fountains outside the Louvres. I never went in for the Eiffel Tower thing, though. I'm still not overly fond of heights, principally because I don't trust myself not to get that cold feeling and find myself overwhelmed by desire to know what it would feel like to go over the edge.
The other thing that happened to me around then was that I met a girl. I realise that it probably sounds, from this account, as if I did that every other week, but this one was different. She was tall and she was thin, and she glowed in the dark, with ivory skin and naturally platinum hair, and eyes of the palest grey. She could quote the classics, understand the scientific issues of the day and discuss politics with genuine passion. I was swept off my feet. I had come to expect that nobody, since the loss of my first love, could kindle such a feeling in me. She was something else. We spent long afternoons together, and my heart was lost. All those foolish things one does for love - I tried to treat her like a lady, despite my ever-present fear that it would lead to people thinking I was a lady myself; I swallowed my pride and bought her halves of sweet cider, and hung out with her female friends, and tried to understand when they giggled about boys. I was noble and restrained, and never made a pass, afraid not only of rejection but also of acceptance, because I was so overwhelmed by her beauty. When she slipped away into the night it was as if somebody had turned off the stars.
It was hopeless, of course. I was too smitten to treat her the way she really wanted to be treated - as a human being. Later, she told me she'd learned to drink guinness, and that I should be proud of her. She fell in love with a rock star who wrote her a top forty song, but who was in turn in love with somebody else. She went her way, and I, bewildered, went mine.
Finishing school was one of the most positive times in my life. Screw all this 'happiest times' shit. I was glad the worst days were over. I left when I was fifteen, as soon as I'd finished my exams, and I got myself a place at college where they tried to make me do 'arts or sciences' but I hassled them into letting me do both. College was a revelation. It felt like suddenly being among adults, real people. I made some great friends there. A crusty biker chick always clad in black with rainbows who was about as wide as she was tall but could command a sexual presence I've rarely seen matched. A beautifully mopey goth boy whom I saw smile just once - when the two of us were sitting alone watching the news report which said missiles had been fired into Downing Street. Tall skinny Karen, who would sit sulking in the refectory for the sole reason that she wasn't married to Bruce Dickinson... I found an English lecturer who encouraged my writing, and who helped me to get my first short story published. And I met another girl... and that confused the Hell out of me, because I was still trying to make things work with the first, and I had never before come across the concept of it being possible to love more than one person at once. It was awkward enough trying to handle the social consequences of being bi, without discovering I was also polyamorous. And I still didn't know the words for all those things.
This girl was the dark, smouldering type, a little plump in all the right ways, though she distressed me by letting her boyfriend give her hassle about that. I thought she was beautiful; I'll always remember her standing alone at the bus stop with big soft flakes of white snow landing in her dark hair. Sleeping in my arms. Telling me that no, she would never feel comfortable doing that with a woman. And, finally, getting out of my taxi and walking away, because she knew that otherwise I would never go, never leave her, and that every other dream I'd had would be crushed if I stayed in that town.
"She must have really loved you," friends said later. I don't think she did; but it didn't matter. Only that I loved her.
I would probably have abandoned college if it wasn't for that girl. I found some of it really difficult because of the amount of stuff I'd missed at school whilst ill, and I began to seriously doubt my own ability. She blackmailed me into staying by saying she'd drop out if I did; there was no way I could jeopardise her future, and I knew she meant it. It was all worth it in the end. I'll never forget the day I got the bit of paper which said I had a place at the University of Glasgow. Suddenly my whole life had been worth it. I'd been fighting for so long in the dark, without sight of the prize, and to see it all revealed at once, this brilliant possible future, was dazzling. I remember walking past my old school, which suddenly seemed so small and insignificant, and laughing for hours without stopping, just hanging around laughing at the wind, because I really didn't give a shit about it anymore. Nothing had stopped me. The last thing I'd expected had been to win.
I worked hard that summer, in a retail job, to save up enough money for the start of university. My parents were worried, but I paid it no mind. I had not the slightest doubt that I could look after myself. I was full of the brash courage of youth. Once I got my bus ticket, I was out of there.
Scotland has always felt like home to me. Maybe it's because I love rain. My mother's family came from Scotland, but they hated it, and tried to change the way they presented themselves (even the way they pronounced their own name) in order to seem more English. I remember getting in huge trouble for using Scots words and phonemes when I was small - it just seemed obvious to me, because they made my speech clearer, and I had no inkling that there might be politics involved. Later, I would visit Glasgow when I needed to get away from things. Just a few days wandering by the river, or in the lush greenery of rain-soaked parks. I connect with this city in a way I never was able to with the place from which I came. I adore it. I idolise it out of all proportion.
Glasgow is a city with a spirit of its own, in equal parts charming and belligerent, which well-meaning middle-class politicians have yet to succeed in taming. No amount of 'Glasgow's Miles Better' or 'Scotland with Style' posters will cover up the city's memories. Pretty coloured flags and entertainments aimed squarely at outsiders - the only ones with money, after all - don't let us forget that in 1919 English troops were brought into George Square to gun down striking ex-servicemen. Fashionable restaurants and properties so expensive no-one will buy them don't conceal the desperate addicts sleeping on the streets, the lost young people selling the Big Issue or selling their bodies; or the old drunken men whose generally friendly cries remain an essential part of the city's culture, no matter how often they're moved on. It's a city torn between Celtic and Rangers football allegiances by people who have all but forgotten the rest of their Catholic or Protestant heritage, and it's the city which produced the world's first newspapers and has more bookshops than anywhere in the world except Toronto. It also has more green space than any other city, a testament both to the strength of the trade unions and the generosity of the tobacco barons. Its stunning Georgian architecture, even where it has fallen into ruin, retains the grandeur of that bygone age, with carved angels overlooking alleyways and turrets decorating tenements. Where rain soaked miserably into the concrete and brickwork of Sheffield, in Glasgow it makes the whole city shine, sparkling across the great river Clyde; and when the sun comes out, the buildings are the golden colour of holiday beaches or the red of Autumn forests. There's no longer any money in what was once the Second City of the Empire, but Glasgow remains rich.
None of us can choose where we are born, but most of us can choose where we live, and where we make our stand. This is my city, and my country, it's just what feels right to me. I have nothing against those from elsewhere, but I know where I belong.
University was easier than I'd expected, at least to begin with. I spent my first year in a student hall of residence, which was weird. I was surrounded by giggly children allowed to drink and allowed out after 10pm for the first time in their lives, and of course they ran riot; their idea of a good time was to drink five cans of cheap lager and run down the corridors all night squealing. In accordance with my usual luck, I had a rather cute roommate, all bouncy blond hair and curves and skimpy underwear, and once again I felt morally obliged not to flirt with her, given our situation and not wanting to make her uncomfortable. A few months later, she moved downstairs to live with another woman, and when I visited one time I found them in bed together. Ah, yes, my typical luck. I was apparently something of a sensation in halls because I was 'hardly there' (ie: I slept at lovers' houses maybe a third of the time) and because I 'actually [had] sex... we just talk about it'. I rather enjoyed being a fresher, because it meant everyone thought I was sweet and innocent - it's amazing how easy it is to take advantage of people who think they're the ones taking advantage; and without feeling guilty about it either. Sex was available on tap because people thought that sleeping with a kid like me made them daring and interesting and all grown-up themselves.
When my roommate moved out, she gave me one bit of useful advice: "Keep your pictures of actresses and movie psychopaths on the walls; don't hoover; and no-one will move in." She, who had never hoovered, knew her stuff. I had the place to myself, and the only double bed in Cairncross House, as I obligingly explained to a nervous Lord Cairncross when he came to look around. The building was frightening, doubtless part of some psychology experiment, with one floor painted in clashing shades of red and pink (where people became manic and aggressive), one in dull greens (where they grew depressed), one in shitty browns and one (where I stayed) in blues and greys reminiscent of famous prisons. His Lordship seemed to think that peasants like us should be grateful for any kind of roof over our heads whilst we were indulged with a frivolous education. Perhaps he was right.
I sought out and joined the science fiction society, Io, as soon as I arrived. As there were only two females there at that time (it's half and half now) I had no difficulty making friends, though perhaps it was more difficult to keep them - I did get a little sick of possessiveness and jealousy from people who had never had any rights over me, and who, for the most part, had never so much as kissed me. I was naïve at first and didn't notice any of that, which made it more awkward later. Ah well. It really shouldn't have been my problem. I was always honest and upfront with people, provided I actually realised what counted as significant to them (their culture seemed a little alien), or provided I got reminded at the appropriate time. I had a couple of half-hearted relationships there which were never going to work out, and a couple of one night stands where there was much more of a mutual connection, and which were much more fun. Having become used to my own bisexuality and bdsm tendencies, and having somehow only run into compatible or at least reasonably open-minded people before, I was rather taken aback by how easily freaked out these new people were. I just wanted to be friends with everyone and have fun. Heh heh. Stupid me.
For a few months I dated a guitarist who made good home brew and had an amp that went up to eleven, but he 'fell in love with [me]' too quickly, and, as I knew I could never love him, I felt it kinder to end things as soon as I realised what was happening. He didn't seem to take it very well. He wrote me a twelve minute progressive rock lovesong in D minor, 'the saddest of all keys' (he knew I hated progressive rock), and hung around for months afterwards getting in the way of the rest of my life. He would go up to women I was conversing with at parties to 'warn' them "You do know she's bisexual, by the way, don't you?" so that I couldn't make small talk without someone thinking I was hitting on them, which was usually not the case at all. Aaarrrgh. Later I met his ex and a girl he fancied and my friend pointed out that we made a neat set, all smallish with blond hair and grey-blue eyes, and I wondered if his interest had ever been about me at all.
Later I went out with an artist who used to take lots of cannabis or LSD and then sit for hours stabbing a knife between his fingers, the fingers which were his livelihood, whilst the rest of us sat around unwilling to intervene in case we caused him to miss. That relationship didn't work out either - he was never really that interested, busy trying to stave off depression, and eventually he went off to Manchester or someplace to have a nervous breakdown; but he was a nice guy, good for being lazy with, lying in bed playing chess all night or watching Gaelic children's television all day. He fell in love with his best friend, as did his other best friend, and then she decided she'd never really been attracted to men, and I, never having had the courage to tell her I thought she was cute, sat quietly in the background being confused, aware that I was often in somebody's way but needing to hang around in the hope someone would tell me what was going on with regard to my own situation. Apparently the third guy we hung around with, who later confessed he was in love with her too, was rather fond of me all along, but never quite plucked up the courage to admit that. Add to this an exuberant and physically very attractive young woman who introduced herself to me by physically leaping into my lap, being extremely friendly, and then proceeded to get very close to my popular female friend while never quite allowing it to become a relationship, and it's no wonder that we got through a lot of grass that summer. Pink Floyd movies, late night TV trash, fairy lights, parties where nobody moved, rooms with air one couldn't see through, and a fad for art-augmented strawberry rolling papers. The world was safer when it was standing still.
I did make some really good friends at Io, as time went by, and I've made more over the years. On and off, I was also involved in the chess club (which Io repeatedly beat at chess), the Monty Python society GUMPAS (who were cool but hardly did anything), GULCH (the Glasgow University League of Calvin and Hobbes, which had a huge membership but no-one who ever turned up, meaning we got to spend their money going on excellent adventures through the highlands instead), the GaySoc (which was mostly male, struggled with biphobia in its early years (it's better now), and never really did anything), and student television. I co-wrote and produced a couple of pantomimes and got involved with numerous other such events, as well as using it as a launching pad for my directing career, working on a number of plays and short films produced by individuals from there. I went to a regular pub quiz on Monday nights to win alcohol. The rugby club took exception to my possession of breasts and an attitude, so I took them on in a drinking competition and won, after which they were suitably meek. I trained for a while with the women's football team, and I swam lots in the free university pool. Overall, it was a good time.
There were a lot of good parties in those days. On one occasion I was requested to help a friend freak out his boring flatmate, who actually turned out to be a really sweet guy (he was later to run a computing company where he gave his employees pizza and beer while they worked). We did the traditional student summoning the Devil thing, but ran out of salt whilst making our pentagram, so we made it out of Kellogs Frosties breakfast cereal instead. As we figured that the Devil must be a busy guy, with lots of party invitations, we placed some cannabis in the middle as a bribe, but figured a blood sacrifice would be better. I was chained to a desk at the time, being taunted by cruel people who held my guinness just out of reach, but I managed to borrow a mobile phone and call up a friend of ours who'd been chasing me for months. "I know it's the middle of the night, but I really need to see you right now." I told him. So he came round. We tied him to a bed and tried sticking a pin in him, but he just sulked and said we were doing it wrong. His mother was a witch, so I guess he learned some things like that. When we released him he cut a hole in his own arm and bled on various parts of the pentagram. We later set fire to it. It's amazing how many calories there are in Frosties. It was a cold winter evening, but we soon felt nice and warm. I guess my friend was lucky, because the landlord came round to inspect the place the following week, but somehow completely failed to notice the large pentagram shaped scorch mark in the carpet. Later, though, came the plagues of fire (when the flat next door burned down, filling the place with smoke), water (when upstairs' bathroom flooded and the ceiling fell in) and flies (when the room's later tenant did a runner and left untended plates of food in his room for maggots to breed in). So maybe I should've paid attention in church after all. ;)
Since the university unions offered large end of term celebrations, but those were very dull (not to mention expensive), my friends and I decided to make our own. We pooled our money and purchased lots of home brew making equipment, then brewed up an average of about eight barrels of beer and cider for our own Pisshead Friday celebrations. We had live music too - in the form of drunken guitarists playing different songs out of time with each other whilst people sang along out of tune - and we had lots of fun. After my friend Kieran taught us to sing 'beer and shouting' along to the Carmina Burana, in accordance with the spirit of the film Excalibur, the parties were renamed, and continued with renewed exuberance.
I went to a few clubs around that time, but there wasn't really much I liked, as Glasgow had no proper goth night then and I had few friends with compatible taste in music with whom I might attend other clubs. Most of them would decry my taste in men and mope that they felt like gooseberries the moment I tried to be sociable. If I did their thing instead, we would be stuck in some sweaty chart music centred meat market for the worst disasters of heterosexual popular culture, and the chances were that there wouldn't even be any proper beer. I preferred Strathclyde University's indie-type student nights, where if I was lucky I might hear Daisy Chainsaw, The Primitives or The Cure, and where I could track down some leather clad black haired beauty with my eyes and freeze frame him till he came my way. It was a deliciously vibrant, sleazy place where they kept the beer chilled and one could screw on the floor under the shadow of the seats without fear of interruption - unless, like me, one was impulsive and accidentally thoughtless enough to consider dancing more important and run off halfway through. Hey, I never said I was any fun, okay?
It was good to have the freedom to do all the things I'd always wanted to do, and unlike most people, I guess, whether out of courage or sheer naïveté, I went ahead and did them. So good the smell of leather in dark alleyways, ripping off each other's clothes. The thrill of being tied up and beaten by somebody who could actually match my own willpower and take me to my limits. Leaping around screaming at concerts, laughing with the band afterwards as they paid me in drinks for pretending they were more than unknowns. Gatecrashing parties by offering pizza to whoever opened the door. Kissing soft-eyed Irishmen as a distraction whilst pouring the foul lager they'd given me into their potted plants. Waking up on strangers' floors in battered taffeta and lace, fixing my make-up in a practiced five minutes and then disappearing to stagger down to Safeway for a can of irn bru. Making all my lectures and handing in all my essays absolutely on time, no matter what. Lying on the grass in the summertime, talking to squirrels, intimidated by large aggressive seagulls, or simply staring and laughing at a very blue lupin with a dear best friend for hours and hours. Sitting in the spray of the fountain listening to the bells toll. Getting my work done even when I felt like I was dying from 'flu. Running down to the river alone, late at night, just to look upon the beautiful stars.
After that first year's study, things got tougher. My parents begged me to go 'home' for a while, but I'd tried that for a month and knew I couldn't stand it. Somehow all the demons which I'd managed to suppress back there were now out with a vengeance every time I so much as thought about it. I began having nightmares so severe that I really couldn't sleep. Rather than go back, I rented a flat sublet by a friend and went without heating for a few months, which is tougher than it sounds in an old stone building, especially when it comes to bathtime. I lived on ten pounds a week until my shoes wore through, then it was reduced to five whilst I saved to buy new ones. Although I wasn't aware of it at the time, I was losing weight rapidly, eating only about eight hundred kilocalories per day. When winter came I had myself a new home, but unbeknown to me there was a hole in the wall of it, so my attempts at heating were futile. Sometimes if it had been raining before I came in I would wake up with ice in my hair. Scaffolding was built up against the side of the building and people started to climb about on it at night. This made my nightmares worse than ever. I became afraid to sleep. I would routinely stay awake for five days in a row, until I began to hallucinate quite severely, then sleep for a whole weekend, because that way there would be no dreams (or at least none that I remembered). I was determined to keep up with everything at university. When I had no energy, I convinced myself it was laziness, and I worked anyway. Since I had noticed I was getting depressed, I determined to cheer myself up by also maintaining a busy social life.
Oddly enough, it was the social life that saved me. At the start of my second year, Donald joined Io. He was tall and thin and pale with long, thick, ringletty mahogany-coloured hair and all kinds of interesting wee scars. I knew from the moment I set eyes on him that I had to make him mine. So I did so... I made sure he was invited to my friend Woody's party. When I got there, I had a space made next to him which I took for myself, and I made casual conversation, asking what he'd been doing that day. He said he'd been traumatised by a maths exam. I expressed sympathy. He asked if he could cry on my shoulder. I put my arm round him, and within seconds we were kissing passionately. Half an hour later we were back at my place. Pulling off our clothes, we fell against the stereo, which crashed to the floor playing the Stones' Let's Spend the Night Together. Donald told me he'd been warned as we left that I'd 'eat [him] alive', and that that had only added to his interest. I knew this was something which could work.
By the new year Donald and I were going out, snatching time together when we could between our busy university schedules and the hours he had to spend travelling to and from his village home. He would call me from there sometimes, and I'd hear his springer spaniel, Glen, barking in the background. Then a flatmate of mine, trying to come off heroin, smashed up the phone, so we could only keep in touch by finding one another on campus. That wasn't so difficult, as he was usually in the union TV room playing cards with engineering students who were hiding from thermodynamics lectures. His subjects were physics and astronomy, and most of his friends were science students who took large amounts of soft drugs, but he wasn't averse to taking an interest in my subject areas, especially when it meant he got taken to see films for free in the mornings sometimes. I enjoyed sitting through the occasional astronomy lecture; I was already regretting not having been able to pursue my scientific interests academically, already aware that I would be written off by many of the people whose work really intrigued me as a useless creature with 'just' an arts degree. I was young enough to be angry about that, not yet old enough to understand that it's what one knows, not whom one can impress, which really matters in the long term.
On the 13th of February, 1993, Donald and I were going out to Strathclyde Level 8 with friends of his. Before we left, nervous as all Hell, I lay on top of him on my narrow bed, took his pulse, and explained "I'm going to tell you now that I love you, because it'll sound irredeemably tacky should it come out by accident in seven hours' time." I had coped well, keeping this secret to myself for fourteen days already, not wanting to scare him. His pulse increased by twelve beats per minute, but otherwise he stayed remarkably calm, except to smile a lot and hold me tighter. Later, we rolled joints in Strathclyde union's toilets, until his friends got too nervous about me being there "because she's a girl!" (apparently a greater concern than breaking the law, though no-one else using the toilets seemed to object to either); so we smoked for a bit upstairs instead, until a bouncer caught us and cautioned "I can't let you do that in here. Eat it instead." And the rest of the night passed in a bit of a daze.
Ten days later, with my flat on the verge of falling down (the building no longer had a roof; the guys upstairs were sleeping under polythene sheets), Donald and I secured another slum which we could move into together, along with our friend Clark. I had then been ill for several days, and in increasing pain, but I'd ignored it, having little choice, as the arrangements had to be made and the lease signed or I would be unable to take care of my long term situation. After signing the lease I collapsed, and my new landlord drove me to hospital. Donald came with me and clung to my hand in the waiting room as I clutched at my kidneys, which felt as if they were on fire. I didn't know what was happening to me and was afraid I might die, which made me furiously angry - the thought of losing Donald so soon after I had found him was intolerable. It took an hour or so for me to get to see a doctor. When one screams in a casualty ward, one is always assumed to be hamming it up. I fainted before they got to me. After the faint I felt different; the stinging pain was gone, replaced by a kind of aching warmth and the delerium associated with shock. I was given a cursory examination, provided with some hideous pills to take (one, foul-tasting, dissolved in a whole pint of water, twice a day; my junkie flatmate, skilled at coping with the horrors of methadone, generously gave me spicy paté to take away the taste); and I was sent away. Donald half carried me home. It was then, as I lay weak and useless on my bed, that he told me he loved me.
Over the months which followed, Donald put in a great deal of work nursing me back to health. He didn't understand the complexities of my condition very well, and would often mess me up further by attempting to force-feed me - my stomach had shrunk and could only handle small amounts of food at a time. But he sat with me and read to me and told me stories. I was amazed that anyone would give me so much attention when I was ill. I soon recovered enough to keep going to my lectures and doing my university work, and to prompt him to do likewise (though, as we lived so close, he was prone to turning up late, in his dressing gown, with a cup of tea in his hand), but I was plagued by opportunistic illnesses and was still struggling with my psychological problems - the nightmares and waking flashbacks - besides. Still, being with him made me feel a lot braver, and it was always fun. Those were by far the happiest days I had known.
At first I was very nervous of meeting Donald's family - I'd gone to such lengths to escape my own, I figured that the last thing I needed was to acquire another. However, when