Chapter One: Fragments of Memory
mother flitted about collecting her things, when she stopped and asked me: ‘Do you think I should leave him?’
She was talking about her husband, my father. I knew that, although I didn’t know what to say. At five you live in your own world. The world of mommies and daddies is beyond your understanding. ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ Mother added with an impatient sigh
I was being ‘impossible.’ She overcame the impossible by letting me help, but always letting me know I was being a nuisance
it wasn’t that there was a lack of care, there was a lack of nurturing, of love
I squealed with pleasure. It took so little to make my life complete. I yearned for Clive to be friendly and playful all of the time, but had to make do with the occasional teasing. He never swung me in his arms or took me for a ride on the crossbar of his bike. Clive didn’t have the fraternal urge to pull me on his knee in front of the television. Mother didn’t either. That was Daddy’s role
It is easy now as an adult to see how I craved love and attention when I was a little girl. That attention came from my father. I was afraid of my father and drawn to him as metal things are drawn to a magnet, as children are drawn to leaning over long drops and crossing the road without looking
Chapter Two: Running and Starving
Grandpa - Are you happy, poppy?
Alice - Yes, yes. Very happy, Grandpa.
Grandpa – Here, have another piece of toffee. I don’t want you wasting away, you’re about as thin as a breath of fresh air.
Alice – I’m always happy when I’m here.
Grandpa – Yes, I know, but are you happy the rest of the time?
Alice – Yes, of course I am.
Grandpa – That’s the spirit. You know what I always say, don’t let things in life embitter you, let them enrich you.
I remember those words so clearly
Mother – everything alright?
Alice – why shouldn’t it be?
Mother – you don’t seem yourself today.
Alice – I’m never myself
She asked me about my dream and the mere mention of my dreams was so agonizing I told her I was one of those people who never dreamed at all.
Therapist Jane – Ah, but everybody does.
Alice – But not everyone remembers.
Jane – Or wants to remember?
Alice – Yes, that’s right
Over the next few weeks I kept deconstructing the dreams of him coming to my room and it was liking shifting shapes in a kaleidoscope, changing the pattern, analysing the parts and putting it back together hoping the picture would look different. Because now, for the first time, I was starting to wonder if these were not dreams, if this had really happened. But dreaming is not the same as remembering. And I didn’t remember.
I was trying to hold onto something tangible, something more than a feeling, and the more I tried the more it seemed like make believe. If these things had taken place how could I have forgotten? You don’t forget these things. It’s not possible. I told myself over and over again that it wasn’t true
Chapter Three: Four Faces
I spent too much time sifting through the past and envied people who lived with the belief that there is just one moment, that the past may never have existed and the future would be construct of what you were thinking today
Alice – You don’t know me
Mum – Of course I do
Alice – Mum, you think you know me. I don’t know me.
She sighed and I left her to eat dinner alone. I would read a lifetime later that the most important thing a family does is eat together and that in our family almost never happened
As I was running, I could see myself from outside myself, the skinny girl with the flapping shorts and too big tee-shirt, the girl forever watching the other girls at school, the girl in the pink bedroom sitting with a book propped on her knees, the words she was reading entering her mind, some sticking like glue, never to be forgotten, other disappearing instantly. I could alternatively remember everything and remember nothing. I would watch movie and recall every scene as if I had written the script, then watch another movie another time and be unable to recall it at all
Alice, hovering just below the ceiling like a balloon and looking down at my own small bed where a big man lay heavily on a little girl I couldn’t quite see or recognize. It wasn’t me. I was spaced out on the ceiling
Keep away from me you loony.
Pretty, confident girls don’t know the affect they have on mere mortals, the pain their clever quip inflict. It was easy to dismiss Lucy or Emma or Gemma as a lightweight, but when people keep saying you’re crazy, it’s like a self-fulfilling prophesy that you think about so much it comes to pass. I would stare at myself in the mirror.
What’s wrong with you, Alice? What’s wrong?
My father couldn’t have done those things. It was impossible. It was my own horrible imagination and I tried all the time to drive these thoughts out of my mind. I ran and starved and washed and studied, trying to eternally suppress the creepy things I couldn’t put into words
It sounded like a blatant lie; something a girl would say to draw attention to herself. The foul-tasting black feeling in my gut was a burning shame. It was as if what had happened to me was my own fault. And if it had not happened, it was my fault for having such noxious thoughts. At sixteen, everything is embarrassing. You don’t talk about things, not those things. You look away. You giggle and shrug
I took the afternoon off school and sat upstairs on the bus eating an apple for lunch and doing breathing exercises. I wanted to present a calm, relaxed Alice to show there was nothing wrong with me. It’s impossible to define ‘normal,’ but whatever it is that’s what I wanted to be, that’s the image I tried to show the world
I remember Grandpa once saying it was a waste of effort getting over the past or the inevitable. I always thought about that, but it’s not so easy to apply
suddenly I couldn’t decide if this scene belong to the memory of my last visit, or came from a dream of hat visit. It also occurred to me that I could be dreaming at that moment and may wake suddenly and find myself somewhere else
Chapter Four: The Voices
If it were true, if that man, who could only have been my father, did come to my room, why couldn’t I remember? And if it wasn’t true, why did I have these things in my head? Was I a bad person? A promiscuous child? Was it all my fault?
We look at other people and imagine we know them. We don’t know them. We can’t know them. Everyone is a mystery. I was a mystery to myself
Mum – I don’t know if I can go on much longer in that house.
Alice – You mean with Dad?
She nodded.
Alice - Nor do I.
Mum – We’ll get a flat or something, Things will be better, don’t you think?
Alice – Mum, the day you leave will be the best day’s work you’ve ever done’
The other little girl was not an illusion, an apparition, she was not an imaginary friend. I would rather have enjoyed having an imaginary friend but never did. The little girl in that car was not imaginary. She was very real. I could see her, she looked like me, and yet I was certain that little girl wasn’t me
My constant struggle was to be ‘normal,’ Not that I had any idea what normal even meant. A girl of sixteen at my school went to a party in a drop dead sexy dress. She drank half a bottle of vodka and went to bed with two boys as the same time because she’d always fancied a threesome. Is that normal? Another girl left school after taking her ‘O’ levels and moved in with the a teacher twenty-five years older than her. Is that normal? A girl who lived close to us an Hasna went to visit her relations in Pakistan that summer and found herself married to the brother of her father. Is that normal?
If I was set an essay on Friday, I’d spend three hours Saturday morning in the library.
Is that normal?
I don’t know
I would feel numb as if dead to the world and moved unconsciously with heavy limbs like a zombie from a horror film. I felt a pain so fierce and persistent deep inside me, I was tempted to take the chopping knife in the kitchen and cut the black thing out. I would lie on my bed staring at the ceiling thinking about that knife and using all my limited powers of self-control to stop myself form gong downstairs to get it
Therapist Jane – When you think back, what do you remember about your parents?
Alice – I remember sitting at the top of the stairs looking through the banisters while they shouted at each other.
Jane – What did they shout about?
Alice – I’m not sure, but I always thought it was about me, or it was my fault.
Jane – It was never your brother’s fault?
Alice – No. Always my fault.
Jane – Had you been naughty.
Alice – I don’t think I was ever naughty.
Jane – You wanted to be a good girl, Alice?
No reply.
I’d be thinking, huh huh, Jane, you almost tripped me up. It was a game. There were things Dr. Purvis had to know if she were going to deal with my problem (whatever it might be), and as a teenager I was playing the game to win and told her a little as possible
My ‘mood’ would be stable. Then, for no apparent reason, I would feel a change come over me and I didn’t know why or what instigated the change. It was like a cloud passing over the sun, or a song on a cassette slipping from one track to another unexpectedly
The more time you spend on your own, the more isolated you feel, and the more difficult it becomes to reconnect. During this black period, you start chewing over all the things that make you feel isolated and depressed. The more you feel isolated and depressed, the more isolated and depressed you become. You start imagining slights where they don’t exist. When you feel bad, you look at other people and they seem nasty and uncaring. If you look for good things in people, as Grandpa always did, then you feel good about yourself. I knew this. I had read every book in the library. But when you feel depressed you only look at the dark side of everyone and everything. You just can’t help it.
Depression is your own worst enemy
Chapter Five: Tricks of Time
When I was little I had assumed it was my fault. Now they were rowing over money, and I felt free from blame and totally unmoved as their voices rose up the stairwell
I didn’t think of myself as having ‘mental health problems.’ You don’t at sixteen. I thought of myself as being ‘special,’ highly-strung, moody
I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At others, I could see in the reflection someone similar but different. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression reforming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or child-like
With her sporty car and fashionable clothes, with her new circle of friends and her lover finally free to be with her, my mother wanted to believe she was living the high life, that she was happy, but I sensed that she was always reaching out for something she was never quite able to get ahold of
I took everything “too seriously.” I analysed things to death. I turned every word, and the intonation of every work through my mind trying to decide exactly what it meant, if there was a subtext or implied criticism. I tried to recalled expressions on people faces, how those expression changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the look on their faced matched, and were therefore genuine; or whether it was a shame, the kind word touched by irony or sarcasm, the smile that means pity
I tended to like anyone who liked me
It’s hard to feel supported when you can’t tell people everything. People haven’t really got a clue what it’s like. It’s hard to trust anyone. It’s hard to believe people won’t let you down. I’m feeling like I want to cry. My body feels hollow. Empty. I don’t feel like I’m 17
It’s hard that no-one can fully understand
Chapter Six: First Love
I had always thought that during the lost time I had lost bits of my life, of myself. But it occurred to me that day that the lost time wasn’t life at all. It was simply misplaced. While I was chasing after time that had gone, I was missing the present moment, that gift of time to stretch and savour. This might sound obvious, but when you have holes in your memory the instinct is to be continually papering over the crack, and it took the new environment of the kibbutz to show me that the past couldn’t be changed or improved by collecting its random parts and sticking it together. It was important to remember and perhaps forgetting is even more important
I had never spent any time with babies before and discovered that they are mirrors of your own moods. If you smile, they smile. If you’re agitated, they get cross and cry. They are unconditionally trusting. How anyone could betray that trust and hurt a baby I cannot begin to imagine
Chapter Seven: Liverpool
I became a recluse obsessively writing and re-writing assignments in an attempt to find the essence of my thoughts. In an essay, there is a point at which the analysis of the views of other ends and the creative rush of personal speculations begin. This rush is like the endorphin buzz reached running long distances. I began to seek this release inside my head
I stuck a pen in her hand while she glanced over the form.
Mother – you’re not serious?
Alice – never been more serious in my life.
Mother – it’ll kill you, Alice.
Alice – then you won’t have to worry about me anymore.
She tut tut tutted and signed her name
I often left her consulting room with the sunken chairs and Venetian blinds more depressed than when I had gone in
All that year I had been looking forward to returning to Neve Eitan, but at the last minute I changed my mind. I didn’t want to sully the memories
I suffer, in memory terms, a combination of amnesia, just plain forgetting, with a depressing trace of hyperthymesia, the opposite. I can remember small personal detail with uncanny recall, useful when you apply the ability to the learning process, soul-destroying when you delve into the past. My past
Of all the animals, only humans are violent, and violence often has a sexual component. I argued in the dissertation that freedom is something which each of us values beyond all other things, and attempted to show how violence is the negation of that freedom
It was the same pattern – all life, it seems, is about patterns – and once the pattern of violence begins, it repeats again and again. Men with low self-esteem, frequently the result of disappointment and unemployment, usually fuelled by drink and drugs, often want to harm themselves but are afraid to do so. Instead, he harms the one person within reach, his wife or companion. If he sees himself as nothing, she is less than nothing, and it must be her fault when he ‘loses his rag.’
A lot of husbands and partners, I discovered, believe it is the wife’s duty to love, honour and obey, and their duty is to punish their wives if they fail in this duty. These men will tell you that they never set out to hurt their women. They only want to help them to be a better person. They strike them as an act of kindness. Of love. It hurts them, they tell their beaten women, more than it hurts the beaten woman.
Respect is the key element. IF the woman has done something wrong, he believes she will not respect him if he doesn’t punish her. It will be easier for him to let her get away with the infringement – not cooking the meal she should have known he was going to want, failing to get another six back from the off-licence, and failing to be a good housekeeper when she explains that there was no money to go to the off-licence. He doesn’t want to punish her but its’ a matter of respect. He craves respect because he does not respect himself.
What the women at the refuge told me was that they had to put up with the violence because they believed deep down their partners loved them. They had become possession and, as possession, the men brutalised them out of a fear of losing what they owned. The women, in turn, put up with the abuse and stayed under the same roof as proof that they had no intention of leaving and loved their partners in return.
It was all very twisted, but I understood. Men have a chronic need to believe they play some essential role in this life, that they are more than just a wave on the sea lost among other waves. When men feel ineffectual, their loss of dignity becomes the self-hatred that erupts in violence that they then inflict on their wife, sometimes their children, often both. Boys who have been brutalised become brutes. Girls who have been brutalised are drawn to brutal men. There is a pattern, and social services often can’t see it
Chapter Eight: Rape
my father was the source of love, and when you are a child bad love is better than no love at all
it is hard to analyse our reasons for doing the things we do, and we do those things for a whole variety of reasons
it was hard to imagine why they were there and where they were going, why anyone was going anywhere
I would read that primates have a fear reflex that increase in darkness. Yet we send infants to sleep in the dark believing it’s good for them. Then we wonder why children cry for attention, why families break down, why almost everyone is neurotic, anxious, stressed, uncertain, afraid. It starts in the cradle
I didn’t want to be alive. I didn’t want to be dead. I wanted to be someone else, some other happier version of myself
Chapter Nine: Where Can I Go?
Once you become acquainted there is no need for gratuitous gossip in Arab countries, and I wonder if perhaps we talked too much about the wrong things in wrong things in order to avoid talking about the things that matter
Chapter Ten: Splitting
Everything at that time was reminding me of something else. There were 10,000 students in Huddersfield and I was reminded that not one of them would invite me to sit and share a pot of mint tea
I had no sexual desires but I did have emotional ones. I felt isolated, cut off, alone, belonging nowhere and to no one. My work did give me a sense of purpose but all work and no play was making Alice a dull grey mournful little girl
thinking about the words in my suicide note. I hate a notebook once with dozens of versions, gone now, but saying in essence my father abused me in an cradle and there was no one there to save me
But the scar in on the inside, on your memory. No one can see it and things you can’t see with your own eyes you don’t quite believe are true
Chapter Eleven: The Children
I feel…what’s the word. That’s it: Happy. Well, perhaps not happy. I don’t feel unhappy
Rebecca – But why? Why?
It was the obvious question. But there was no simple answer. The women at the refuge I’d interviewed at Liverpool all had different answers: shame, love, fear that no one would believe them; the fear that no one could do anything to prevent the abuse even if they did believe them; the fear of being alone, a fear I knew all too well.
Alice – You just don’t
Why did Karl do that?
He did it because he was so befuddled, so anguished, so stressed, the physical pain was a relief from the mental agony. He did it, too, because the sight of red blood running over white arms has an aesthetic quality, a bright beauty in dull grey Huddersfield
I found myself putting my arms around her and I thought what a weird things it is to be human
It occurred to me how we all live in our own world. How Gerald couldn’t see that I ways someone who needed understanding no scolding; how Brian, at his desk across the room, had never asked me anything about me, even my name; how my father’s clients had no idea that the avuncular man who drew up wills and advised on house sales had abused his daughter all through her childhood
you see a woman hit her child or a couple arguing in the supermarket and imagine you have some insight into their situation and you have none whatsoever
Chapter Twelve: Opening the Closet
the future is a mystery; we can survive an unspeakable present because the future is unknown
it seems to me that what he wanted to reshape wasn’t the future, but the past
‘mental health issues’ are intrinsically selfish, and the struggle to be “normal” has to be accompanied by the struggle to pay attention to the needs and cares of others
Alice - This is embarrassing.
Roberta - It doesn’t have to be.
Alice - It doesn’t have to be, but it is
Chapter Thirteen: Human Touch
When you don’t think very highly of yourself you imagine other people don’t like you
The light was behind her. A shadow must have crossed the sun. My throat was dry. My body was shrinking. My face was changing shape. I could feel the scaffolding below my cheekbones disintegrating and reforming. The sun came out again. Colours grew brighter and there was a nice lady sitting on a grey chair and I thought I knew her name but wasn’t sure
They were living in their own bubble, ...barely conscious of all we can be and do as humans and, like them, I wasn’t doing or becoming those things either
Chapter Fifteen: Bedlam
Sophie could never forget what had happened to her. There were two children to remind her every day. The pain was so great, at those times when they bundled her up into the seclusion room she would let out a piercing scream that came from the depths of her wounded soul and made you imagine all the nightmares and horrors of eternity
Chapter Sixteen: Regression
Now, just as I had talked, she talked. It was her turn. That’s how we are, how people interact. They rationalize, they deflect, they justify, they weave a basket and fill it with defense mechanism
I can’t help it. I live alone, in my head. I have few friends and lose the friends I do have. People think I’m weird, and I am, I suppose
Why are the kids there? (Although I think I knew the answer to that anyway, perhaps because I felt like I was never a child?)
I just want to sleep and block it all out
I want to cry, but feel like stone, cold and hard. I cannot allow myself to experience the depth of my feelings, so I just turn my emotions off
Then everything falls silent. I’ve gone numb and feel like stone again. The only trace of emotion is they crying in my head
I wasn’t living. I was barely existing. I was sinking down inside myself as if a mine shaft lead to the mystical depths of my being. To my soul
Chapter Seventeen: Body Memories
I just feel sad and empty. And also alone – cut off from the world, in the sense that I’m merely existing whilst there is life around me
Chapter Eighteen: Complex Multiples
Psychiatrists in my experience often seem to be coping with their own psychological issues – perhaps that’s why they were attracted to the profession – and are on occasions incapable of focusing on their patients. It would be comical if it wasn’t true
Even though Jacob and I had made a commitment and Jacob had written about how he had ‘conquered his doubts about being vulnerable,’ of course he was still vulnerable. So was I . I trusted Jacob more than I ever trusted any man, but I was terrified and incapable of letting myself go completely and settling into a normal relationship. It’s the fear of damaged people. You hold back. You hide yourself. Protect yourself. It’s like you have been submerged in a barrel of black tar. No amount of cleaning and therapy seems to wash it all off. You remain fragile and you damage others whether you realise it or not
Chapter Nineteen: Charlie
I trusted him, it’s easier trusting good-looking people for some reason
Sam would turn tricks if she had to. A girl with nothing always has that
the feeling of euphoria. It was always good after that first time, but it was never quite as good
You look at me, you look at my medical records, and you say to yourself; what’s wrong with that girl? And what’s wrong is that from being a baby in my cot to being a teenager I was constantly raped, buggered and abused. You don’t get over it. You just don’t. It wasn’t something I had done. It was something my father had done to me
Chapter Twenty: The Other Side
Drugs are like a warm bath, a good night’s sleep, a sunny day, a smile. Drugs are fun. That’s why people take them. They don’t take drugs because they’re addicts; addiction is the side effect. People take drugs because they want to get out of their heads. Drugs change reality. And if your reality’s crap, it doesn’t matter how many times you decide to quit drugs, the temptation is always there, calling you like those sirens of the sea luring mariners to steer their ships to disaster
People are rarely interested in the minutia of other people’s lives, their airport nightmares, hospital dramas, the uncaring bank
TODAY I'M ALICE: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6511517-today-i-m-alice
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