Tales of Sin & Fury Part 1: The Beach

me.’

1

Every Cut Tells a Story

Sunday 16th December 1990 2.15 pm

I open my eyes and take a breath. On the wall in front of my face, graffiti are scrawled in black: ‘I love Tracey,’ ‘Cunts are best,’ ‘Sweet dreams are made of this.’ I can see the edge of the iron bed I’m lying on. Probably the sheets were once white. I can see my right hand dangling down out of the bed as if it didn’t belong to me. I see a broad silver ring on the little finger and for a second some sodden place in my brain reacts. That ring has a story. I close my eyes again.

I am stifling. My head is full of concrete. I try to take another breath but I can’t find the air. Silk threads tie my tongue.

Nearby I can hear two women talking.

‘That’s a deep wound, babe.’

‘I did it here.’

I roll slowly on to my back. The right arm is numb from being squashed. I open my eyes and look across. The room is large and bare apart from the other three beds sticking out into it, each of them with a small cupboard beside. The air is hot and stuffy, and it smells of disinfectant. At the end I can make out a close-set row of narrow windows, but I can’t see through.

I remember police. This must be a prison.

The two women are talking by the next bed.

One of them is holding up the sleeve of a shiny party blouse to show a fresh scar. I close my eyes and open them again, trying to focus on her wrist. The blur starts to clear. I see that the scar is about two inches long, with raised edges. It is still livid red but has started to heal over, and there are traces of brown iodine staining the skin around it. I look up at her face. It’s angular and her hair is in a pony tail. She can’t be more than twenty. ‘I did it here,’ she repeats, ‘last time.’

‘You shouldn’t do that, Debs,’ says the other woman. She leans forward to look and her stringy peroxide hair falls over her aged young face. ‘Hurt them, girl, not yourself.’

Debs wrinkles her pointed nose, ‘You can say that.’ Her features jut angrily under her pale skin. ‘Easy to say that.’

I try to remember why I am here. Fog where my memory should be. I remember the water everywhere. I remember the uniforms and their voices when they took me, like speaking to a naughty child. Or to a dog that might bite again.

An ocean of tears. My mouth is full of dead flowers. Revenge is meant to taste sweet.

I shiver and shut my eyes again. Then I feel nausea pull at my stomach, and vomit starts scorching up through my gullet. I roll onto my side and retch, but nothing comes out. They notice me.

‘Look, it’s alive,’ says the stringy peroxide blonde. She comes over to investigate. ‘What did they say her name was – Karina?’

‘About time,’ says Debs.

‘How you doing, Karina?’ asks the stringy peroxide blonde. She peers into the bedclothes to size me up, curiosity and concern drifting across her face. It looms close to me, round and flat like a full moon. ‘I’m Mandy,’ she says, ‘Welcome to hell.’ She reaches into her jeans pocket and hands me a crumpled paper hanky.

‘Corinne,’ my voice sounds as if it’s coming from somewhere else a long way away.

‘What kind of name is that anyway?’

‘For my sins…’ I try to move my mouth and push the words out.

‘So you got sins too. Join the club.’

‘…it’s the name my mother gave me.’ My body snatches at me again but when I retch nothing comes out. I rub my mouth with the tissue.

‘Ooh, Mother is it? So you got one of them. I was beginning to wonder. Didn’t hear you calling for her when you was moaning last night.’

I heave at the bedclothes and try to lever myself up. I’m not sure where the muscles are to move my body.

‘Why would I?’ She’s the last person I’d call for.

‘We all do it sooner or later,’ says Mandy. ‘Even posh ones like you.’

I get a few inches further towards vertical and my body starts juddering, ‘Oh, God.’

‘We try him n’all. Never get much joy there neither.’

I manoeuvre myself up to sitting and try to take a breath. ‘Why’s it so muggy in here? Like a sauna.’ My lungs fill with sickly overheated air. I am suffocating. I cough and it turns into a retch. Nothing comes out. I hold the tissue to my mouth.

‘A sauna? Except here you get dirtier.’ Mandy cackles as she goes over to the steamed-up curtainless windows. She opens one and lets in some dank December air. Outside I can see the corner of another high brick building opposite, and beyond it a leafless tree.

‘I tell you,’ she says, ‘you’ll feel worse before you feel better. As it wears off.’ She stares at me. ‘Look at the state of you. Been through the mill. Bet you was a good-looking woman once. Back when. Blue eyes. Got the bones. Real blond. Now look at it.’

Good-looking. They used to say that. I put a hand up and feel for my head. I haven’t seen it for a while, but it seems to be in the usual place. Wispy hair, needs washing.

Mandy sees me feeling it. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll give you set times for washing and that. Not any time soon.’

I look at my hand. Bits of mud under the nails. Scratches on the fingers. I got the scratches from a rose bush… when was that? Working in Mr. Bradford’s rose garden. All that seems a long way away. I remember I have clients. They’ll be wondering where I am.

I look around across the unmade beds. Sounds of voices and footsteps outside. Down on the floor beside my bed a striped shoulder bag in a heap. That looks familiar. And battered brown boots. My boots. They must have followed me here, I don’t remember walking in. The rainbow laces are gone. Boots staring at me with empty lace-holes, vacant as my brain. My body feels like it has been assembled from spare parts that don’t match. With vomit as glue. Best keep still. I put my hand down.

Mandy says, ‘We didn’t think you was ever going to come round, did we Debs?’

‘I wish I hadn’t.’ My voice sounds slurred.

‘See, there you go, you shouldn’t say them things. You gotta be positive. You’re bad as her, look.’ She grabs Debs’ wrist and pulls it towards my bed. She pushes the sleeve up, showing rows of red lines in the flesh up to the elbow. ‘That was a good arm once. Now it’s like them railway tracks outside King’s Cross. Never mind the needle marks.’

Debs pulls her hand away and walks off to the window. ‘Don’t show me up.’

‘Bet you never done any of that stuff, eh… Corinne?’ says Mandy. ‘Cutting yourself up? You don’t look the type.’

I look away and stare at the graffiti on the wall.

What does she know, what type I am or what I’ve done? What does she know about what I did twenty years ago? That’s the last thing I want to think about. I’ve got enough problems now.

When I look back, her face is smooth like a well-guarded secret. Her eyes are toughing me up, but there’s no malice in them.

I say, ‘I did cut myself once.’

There, I’ve said it. What the fuck. I shut my eyes and fiddle with the ring on my little finger.

Just the once and I still have the scar. From the last time life shut the door in my face. No reason for one breath to follow the other. Like now.

‘Let’s have a look.’ Mandy lifts my cardigan sleeve and examines my left arm from elbow to wrist. I watch. I don’t have the strength to stop her. When you’re that down, you let people handle you how they want. I feel I’ve forfeited my rights over my body.

‘You ain’t done nothing,’ says Mandy as she leans over to inspect my right arm. ‘Nothing here neither.’ But when she gets down to my right hand she stops and calls out: ‘What the fuck were you trying to do here?’

I snatch my right hand away, clutching the ring on the little finger. Shit. I bury the arm under the sheets.

Mandy looks at Debs: ‘She done it all right. Big time. She’s been there.’

‘Lessee,’ says Debs, turning back from the window. ‘Lessee what she did, Lady Muck.’

I sink back under the bedclothes. ‘Leave me alone.’ I don’t want to carry the can for the sins of my class. Not now. A class that disowns me.

‘Don’t be shy,’ says Mandy. ‘Every cut tells a story.’

A story I’ve never told. The last time, twenty years ago, that I felt like this. The last time I fell through the floor of the world.

I hear keys rattling and a door opening. It’s round the corner from my bed, I can’t see. Then a brusque voice: ‘Haynes! Doctor.’

From under the covers of the bed at the far end, a woman with tousled hair emerges fully dressed in tight silver trousers. She puts her feet into a pair of trainers and shuffles past us.

Debs stares after her. ‘She ain’t said a word since she came in last night. What with her and you lying there it’s been like a bloody morgue.’

I hear the door shut behind her with a heavy thud, and keys turning in the lock.

‘So, what, you did that once, and that was it?’ Mandy asks me, ‘Just the once?’

I stare out from the bedclothes. ‘What?’ Drop it, woman. Back off.

‘What you done to yourself.’ Mandy points. ‘How come you never finished the job? How come you never done it again? Cat got your tongue? We might learn something.’

‘Or not.’ I lever myself back up to sitting, keeping my right hand under the sheets.

‘Please yourself.’ Mandy sits down on the side of my bed and starts rubbing her toes with chipped ruby-varnished finger tips. Below her jeans she’s wearing white party shoes with a single broad strap and no socks: ‘My feet are cold. Monday tomorrow, visits. Wish Dave would bring me some socks.’

‘When did you tell him?’ asks Debs.

‘I rang my Mum, didn’t I? He should know by now.’ Mandy turns to me. ‘So how d’you end up in here, spending Christmas where Santa don’t visit? With us peasants?’

Clouds gather in my head. It’s beginning to come back, but I wish it wasn’t. ‘Something happened to me. Then I hit the bottle. Then I did something I should never have done.’

‘More like the bottle hit you. We can see that.’

‘I did something bad and I caused a lot of damage.’ That much I know.

‘We all done stuff we don’t wanna talk about,’ says Mandy. ‘Gotta move on.’

‘Now I’m being punished. Some festive season this is going to be.’ I close my eyes and I can feel my spine crumpling.

‘Take it easy,’ says Mandy. ‘We’re on remand here. Could be out in a week or so. You’re lucky you’re not coming off heroin. You’ll be on your feet before us two. The next ten days ain’t gonna be no picnic for us. They put us on methadone, then they start cutting it. All over Christmas. You’re lucky, mate.’

I groan. Some luck.

‘Put it this way,’ says Mandy. ‘This is the first day of the rest of your life. I know what. Got a pen, Debs?’

Debs peers in a couple of the bedside cupboards and comes up with a blue felt tip pen. The felt’s a bit squashed and woolly at the end, but it’s still moist and it makes a mark as Mandy writes the number one on the wall beside my bed and rings it with a circle. ‘Day One,’ she announces. ‘Take it a day at a time. We know. We been here before.’

Debs sits down on the bottom of my bed and twirls her pony tail slowly round her finger. She stares at my forearms below my pale blue cardigan. My right hand’s still under the covers. ‘Ain’t you skinny. I can’t see no scars.’

She’s all sharp edges and bloodless inquisitiveness. Her eyes are intelligent and piercing. I feel her long nose wanting to poke into my business. I mumble, ‘It’s a long story.’

‘Go on, then,’ says Mandy. ‘Spill the beans. We got time, here in Her Majesty’s Hilton. Debs and I are all talked out, ain’t we babes? And Debs needs some tips on how to stop slicing herself up.’

I inch my knees up under the bedclothes and hug them, there’s some comfort in that. ‘So it’s Tell us a story time,’ I say.

‘That’s all we got left in here,’ says Mandy. ‘They’ve taken everything else off us, ain’t they?’

‘Have you been in here long?’ I ask.

‘A few days,’ she says. ‘You don’t never stay long on this wing. Just to clean you out. Then they move you over to join the rest. Unless you come up in court first.’

I screw up my face and try to make sense of all that’s left in my brain of my arrest. The close-up views of blue serge uniforms, the stern voices, the doors closing, and the vomit… ‘They didn’t tell me,’ I say. ‘Or maybe I can’t remember.’

‘You was out like a light, mate. We got a right alky here, chuck her into Detox. But every alky got a story.’

A spasm zig-zags through my body and I grit my teeth.

I don’t know you. You’re like faces pressed against the glass. But you don’t want to see what’s inside.

‘So I’m Lady Muck?’ I say, ‘Why would you want to hear what happened to me?’

‘Don’t take no notice of Debs,’ says Mandy. ‘She’s just a kid. With a dirty mouth. She don’t mean it. We’re all brought down to the same level here, ain’t we? Tell you what, Debs’ll give you the low down on how she started cutting herself. I heard that one already. Then you tell us how you stopped.’

‘What?’ says Debs.

‘Go on, babes,’ says Mandy. ‘It ain’t no secret. You went to see The Evil Dead. You told me yesterday, remember?’

‘We got a deal?’ asks Debs, narrowing her eyes at me. Her mouth is set hard, not to let anything escape except verbal pellets aimed at other people. A kind of meanness hangs about her like a stale smell. ‘We got a deal?’

I shrug. Do I have a choice?

Course of least resistance. Buy time. Perhaps the world will go away. Perhaps I’ll lose consciousness and wake up next year when it’s all over.

‘Come on then,’ says Mandy. ‘My Life with the Knife, a true story, by Debs.’

‘Scissors,’ says Debs. ‘It was scissors the first time.’ She uses the long nail of her little finger to clean her other nails. Then she points her nose at me. I realize this is for my benefit, because Mandy’s heard it before. ‘It was a Saturday,’ she says. ‘I went to see The Evil Dead. With my big sister and her boyfriend. It wasn’t for kids, right. I was 12, but I had a new skirt and heels and that, and make-up, and I got in. It’s about these people in a cabin in the woods. All demons and people going mad and getting killed. Trees twisting theirselves round you and eyeballs popping out and chainsaws and black slime. You seen it?’

I shake my head. And from the sound of it I don’t want to.

Debs stands up, stiffens her body rigid and rolls her eyes up into her head. She twists her mouth into a parody of a smile, ‘We’re gonna get you! We’re gonna get you! she chants at me in a weird little girl voice. It has a grating edge like a knife scraped across a saucepan. It goes right through my head.

Mandy giggles. ‘Pack it in.’

Debs turns to her, ‘I thought it was funny too, n’all. But my sister, she’s a right big girl’s blouse. We got out of the pictures, she was shaking and looking up and down the street. It’s only a film, right? When we got back to the flats her bloke went off to talk to some mates, we were going home across the grass. She was limping, she had some stupid shoes she couldn’t walk in. I went ahead and hid behind the side of our block. I waited and when she come round the corner I stepped out and like one of them ghouls in the film I grabbed at her sudden like THAT…’

At this moment Debs’ hand springs towards my throat like an animal unleashed.

It’s a shock but I don’t flinch. I learnt at school not to react to bullies. Never show fear. And anyway I’m too far gone to care. I sit tight and stare back at her.

‘… It was a joke,’ says Debs. She opens her mouth wide and lets out a roar of demonic laughter.

‘Some joke,’ says Mandy.

Debs lets her hand drop from my throat and stops laughing. ‘Well, I didn’t know, did I? How she’d go?’

‘What happened?’ I ask.

‘My sister, right,’ says Debs, ‘she sort of exploded into bits like a balloon. Shrieking and panting like someone having a good time. Shaking. Yelping like a cat that got trod on.’

‘Sounds like she was having a fit,’ I say. I put my hand up to my head again. My left hand. Keep the right hand hidden. I take the weight of my head. Maybe something can stop the spinning.

‘A fit, right, that’s what my mum said, when I got my sister upstairs to the flat. Hysterics. Going on like that, WA – WA – WA – WA – WA.’ As she imitates her sister, Debs’ arms oscillate and her pony tail judders and her lips vibrate. It would be funny if it wasn’t painful. ‘Daft sod my sister, my Mum slapped her round the face but she didn’t stop. WA – WA – WA…’ Debs does the shaking again like a crazy kettle over-boiling.

‘Your poor fucking sister,’ said Mandy, ‘What you done to her…’

‘My sister kept pointing at me,’ Debs says, ‘and they sussed it was all down to me. They were well pissed off. They tried to give her water to drink but she knocked it on the floor.

‘My dad turned on me, Hope you’re pleased with what you done to your sister, you little monster. She was always his favourite.

‘He took his belt off. You’re not too old to learn the hard way. He grabbed me and tried to put me over his knee like I was a kid. My mum didn’t do nothing to stop him. I fought back. Fuck him. Put his filthy fucking hands on me. I got away, right, and I ran into our bedroom and I locked the fucking door. My sister was still doing her nut, I could hear her. I felt like I was bursting, like I had to do something. I opened my sister’s drawer. I found a pair of nail scissors. The first line I made it didn’t do nothing. But then I did it again. Nice and slow, so I could see the skin ripping.’ Debs holds out an arm to show me. In the criss-cross of thin red scars she directs me to a particular one. Almost with pride.

‘Silly cow,’ says Mandy. ‘You wasn’t hurting no-one but yourself.’

Debs strokes her arm. ‘You don’t get it, do you? When the blood started coming, I felt better. It blotted out the other stuff. That’s how it goes. Works every time.’

There is a silence. Like a nasty taste I remember how bad you have to feel about yourself for the sight of your own blood to be a relief. I look at her small tight mouth and there is just a quiver on the upper lip. It hurts, all ways round, but she’s not going to let on.

‘Works every time,’ she spits out again.

Then Mandy says, ‘Until the next time. If you haven’t bled to death.’

‘I know when to stop.’

‘That’s what they all say.’

‘You can talk,’ says Debs. ‘If you’re so know-it-all, how come you’re doing heroin?’

‘Leave me out of this,’ says Mandy. ‘Now you gonna hear from Corinne here how she stopped all that hanky panky with knives.’ She turns to me, ‘Over to you, babe. Hope you’re gonna cheer us up.’

I shut my eyes. ‘I’ve never talked about this stuff to anyone.’ Perhaps when I open them all this will be gone.

‘That’s OK,’ says Mandy. ‘In here don’t count. We’re doing time, ain’t we? We’ll never meet on the out. In here’s a different world, init, Debs? Go on, Corinne. Never know, you might even feel better after.’

I open my eyes. It’s all still there. Same cell. Same smell of hot dirt and sweat. Same flickering fluorescent light that irritates overloaded switches inside my head. Same two women by my bed, looking at me. ‘OK, I’ll tell you why I never cut myself again.’

It can’t make me feel worse than I already do. How stupid do I feel to tell them it was because of a man I cut myself twenty years ago. And here I am going through hell again. Because of another man. Back at rock bottom. Back in this grey netherworld, transparent as a wraith. I can’t blame the people whose hands slipped against mine as I fell into the abyss. The abyss is inside me.

‘OK,’ I say again, ‘I’ll tell you what happened.’ Twenty years ago. I’ll do anything not to think about what happened yesterday. Maybe I could hitch a ride on the story and end up somewhere else. Maybe I could weave my own magic carpet to escape from here.

I take a deep breath.

Mandy exchanges glances with Debs. ‘Oi, quit stalling.’

‘Talking’s difficult,’ I tell her. ‘I need a drink.’

‘Get started,’ says Mandy. ‘It’ll take your mind off of it.’

I cough and retch and put my hand over my mouth and rummage in the bed for that bit of tissue. They’re still looking at me, waiting. Eventually I say, ‘It was back in 1971.’

‘What? I was only seven then,’ says Mandy, ‘You don’t look that old, mate.’

‘I was only just born,’ echoes Debs.

‘I was twenty two,’ I tell them, ‘and I was in love.’

‘That’s new,’ says Mandy. ‘Nice, was he? Handsome?’

Handsome? Not really. Tall and dark… but not handsome. Twenty years later, his face is still scorched into my retinas. Skulking. Glowering. He didn’t need looks for what he did. Just charisma like a razor. He sucked all the love out of me. He squeezed out my confidence like the juice from an orange.

I dab with my fingers at a mark on my blue cardigan. I must have been sick on it at some point. If we could rub out memories. ‘I don’t know if you’d say nice,’ I tell them. ‘But when he ended it, in the summer of ’71, I felt so raw inside I needed a knife to show it on the outside. A serrated knife with a brown wooden handle.’ Debs’ hawk eyes are scouring my lower arms. ‘The scar isn’t on my arms,’ I tell her, ‘Mandy knows where it is.’

But I’m not going to show you. So unpeel your eyes. Back off.

‘Friends tried to patch me up. But I couldn’t pretend that life goes on. I went back to the cottage in Dorset where I’d been with him, and waited for him. I waited for months.’

‘Did he have a name, this bloke?’ asks Debs.

I’m scared to say it, even so long after. As if speaking it out loud could summon him back. I steel myself: ‘Hayden,’ I say.

‘There, that wasn’t so hard,’ says Mandy. ‘So, where were you… In some cottage…?’

‘Yes,’ I carry on. ‘In December ’71, nearly twenty years ago, there I was sunk in that threadbare chintz armchair. Where he used to sit. Hayden.’ Saying his name out loud again is strange. Hearing my voice speaking in sentences is strange. But the words seem to come stumbling out, one following the other. ‘I was waiting for him to come back. Shivering in front of the fire where he used to warm his hands. Logs spluttering in the old-fashioned black iron hearth. But nothing could drive the cold out of my bones.’

I always thought he would come back. On the arm of the chair was my diary. Where I’d written it all. The blue cover with words and pictures pasted on it, from the good times of our summer together. The edges of the pictures were curling. Our love was unpeeling.

‘I looked into the fire, and that was when I realized I had to go to Greece.’

‘Greece?’ says Debs. ‘Whassat for?’

I stop and think. ‘I don’t think I knew at the time. Perhaps it was the Greek myths I read as a child. I didn’t know why or how, but I knew I had to go. And I did. One day I started walking and left everything behind.’

All the clothes I wore when I knew him. My blue cord jeans with the patchwork flares I’d sewn in. My embroidered blouse with the ribbon he used to untie. The books. Even my diary. That diary. I left that behind too. If I could see the diary again, perhaps I could understand what happened.

‘So did ya walk there?’ asks Debs.

‘I walked the first bit. Then I hitched. I’d saved some money. Got trains. I worked here and there. I kept going ’till I got to Greece. It had always been my dream. I buried my nose in the sand and the sun melted me and joined me together again. Healing the wound.’

‘Lucky sod,’ says Mandy.

‘I been in the sun,’ says Debs, ‘and it didn’t make no difference to me.’

‘I was there for weeks, months. Camping by the sea with these two guys. It’s because of them that I never cut myself again.’

‘Two? That’s naughty. Let’s have it.’

I look at these two women I don’t know. ‘Why am I telling you this?’

‘Take it this way,’ says Mandy, ‘We ain’t going nowhere for a couple of weeks. ’Till we done the detox. We get out of this room two hours a day if we’re lucky. We’re out of tobacco. The food’s crap. There’s no TV. Shoot.’

I feel cornered. My head is pounding and I don’t feel strong enough to argue. I struggle with my left hand to prop a pillow behind my back. Mandy comes round to help and whispers in my ear, ‘Go for it, girl.’

A smile passes between us, we kind of make half of it each, and I start.

‘We were camping on an island. On the ferry going there I realized why it had to be Greece. It was around Easter 1972. I was sitting on a bench on deck with my hair blowing, the light so bright it hurt your eyes. Luminous, Henry Miller called it.’

‘Who’s he?’ asks Debs.

‘I was