Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
BOOK 1
In an English Garden
Animal Kingdom
Girl with a Suitcase
Fork on the Left
I ♥
Corinna’s Armpit
A Stone Splits
Dog Days and Ice
Burning
The Colour Purple
Thelma of Distinction
Jesus Blinks
Aubrietia
Limited Options in the Late Twentieth Century
BOOK 2
Out-of-body Privileges
But the Greatest of These is Love
Dreamy Spacecake
Cave Dwellers
“An Item”
Who Needs a U-Haul?
Thelma Takes up Room
Fish Girls
Not Designed for Comfort
Golem Reversing
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Thelma is six years old. Life at home is unsettling and disturbing; her father’s games are not enjoyable and her mother dotes on Willy, the favoured child. When her parents move to Canada Thelma smuggles her imaginary friends with her in her suitcase. Thelma’s life is mostly lived in her fertile and extraordinarily vivid imagination. And she still asks every adult she meets to adopt her-Mouthing the Words tells Thelma’s story though to adulthood and her return to England – to study law at Oxford – in a novel that is by turns harrowing, terrible and wonderfully funny. Through sexual abuse, anorexia and borderline multiple personality disorder, Thelma retains her spirit, wit and imagination. Reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson and Sylvia Plath Mouthing the Words is a remarkable and inspiring fiction debut.
About the Author
Camilla Gibb was born in London in 1968. She grew up and studied in Canada, before returning to England to do a DPhil in anthropology at Oxford. She lives in Toronto.
To Ted
BOOK 1
In an English Garden
THIS IS WHERE the man called our father comes from: he is sitting in a barn with his brothers Garreth and Timothy on a rainy April afternoon in the Cotswolds. Garreth, two years his senior, is home for the Easter Holidays, having just completed his second term at the Wheaton School. Mother Puff, named for the soft grey sponge of hair that frames her face, has been gurgling about her eldest—“isn’t he quite the little gentleman now”—for the better part of the day. Five-year-old Timothy sits mute for most of his waking hours, his cheeks permanently inflated with a store of Liquorice Allsorts.
Douglas is in the middle—too young for boarding school, and usurped, in the candy-coated affections of his mother, by his younger brother. He is broody and introverted, with what will ultimately be his dramatic early hair loss already in evidence in the recession above his furrowed brow. Puff, by way of preventative measure, coats his forehead with an egg white every evening before Douglas says goodnight. In bed he dreams of being an allied bomber pilot and though out of dreamtime a real war is going on, there is nevertheless always an egg to be spared for Douglas’s head.
This extravagance secretly infuriates father Hugo. Puff cracks a warm peacock egg over the rim of a white porcelain bowl and says, “Well, I’m going to see that our young Doug is the proudest peacock of all.” As Gloucestershire’s most esteemed ornamental bird farmer, Hugo trembles when he sees the fruits of his labour wasted on the thick skull of his middle son. He cannot argue, though, because this is, after all, a house dominated by Puff’s repertoire of rather strange ideas.
On this particular afternoon—in one of her idiosyncratic and perversely well-intentioned attempts at parenting—Puff has locked the boys together in the barn. She has decided that the best way to ensure her three boys cultivate a lifelong dislike for the taste of evil is to let them spend several daylight hours indulging in gin and tobacco and making themselves “sick as sin.”
While the details of what ensues behind the locked door of the barn go unrecorded in the annals of the collective family history, the irony of the endeavour is not lost on future generations. All three boys grow up to favour grain spirits over meaningful connections to other people.
Our father, Douglas Tate Barley, was the one of the three brothers conveniently blessed with initials describing what for his pre-teen children seemed like one of the more embarrassing side effects of his condition. Of course, we did for years think that all daddies shook.
Somehow all three of the boys ultimately marry, though not without controversy. Garreth appears to have married Cassandra because Cassandra used to be Douglas’s girlfriend. At least it seems that way given comments like: “I did her a favour, Douglas. She was far too bloody good for you.” Cassandra is from Australia, and this fact causes father Hugo to go to his grave saying things like: “We shipped her kind off to the blasted colonies for a reason.”
Timothy asks Louise to marry him because (although he is admittedly enchanted) on the evening he introduces her to his parents, his father says, “Now that’s a bloody gonk if I ever saw one.” Surely the timing of this proposal cannot have been mere coincidence.
The man who is to become our father marries the woman Garreth is discovered clambering on top of in the back seat of his Rover six-and-a-half days after his wedding to Cassandra. Douglas has just been discharged from the army for some unknown indiscretion and he does not know what to do apart from getting married. Poor Cassandra attends the wedding of my future parents and appears to be the one most moved to tears by the sight of the lovely bride.
Rather cleverly though, my soon-to-be father has managed to marry the daughter of an RAF captain who he assumes will help get him reinstated. He is feeling rather proud of himself. Not only is there a potential job on the horizon, but he has successfully transformed Garreth’s indiscretion into Cassandra’s sister-in-law. Like his brothers, though, he is not free from the racist wrath of Hugo. With her long, jet black hair, his new bride Corinna is the object of slurs like, “We didn’t win the bloody war so you could go and marry one of them!”
Lest you should think my future mother but a hapless pawn in this whole exchange, let me assure you, she had her own selfish motives. She positively relished the thought of her father and mother saying:
“Do you think this is why we sent you to finishing school in Switzerland?”
“This just can’t be happening. The son of a peacock farmer, Corinna?” her mother sighed.
At which point my future mother tactfully responded, “Perhaps you could help him find a job, Daddy. He’s just been fired from the army.”
—
We trust that what we know to be normal is normal simply because it is known to us. Worlds meet in collision and the coherence of our histories crumbles. I feel it in the blank looks I tend to receive at dinner parties. When other people recount stories, I habitually interject with statements like, “Oh yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I used to feel just like that when my father held me over the bridge by my armpits.” Eyes previously animated are suddenly staring soberly. “You know?” I might add hopefully. “That bridge over the Don River?” A gracious dinner party host might break the uncomfortable moment with some tactfully placed suggestion of more Stilton. And if I had a lover, this would be the perfect moment to give me a reassuring squeeze of the thigh under the table and whisper something in my ear like, “It’s OK, dear. Just try not to talk.” Often, silence has seemed like the only option.
I used to wonder if people actually did know what I was talking about and were just being particularly stubborn. At home later, I searched a mind of endless tangled fields of bracken and gooseberry bushes, whispering to my imaginary lover in the dark, to whom I described a silent, tiny, perfect world of strangers. “Haven’t you ever seen it? What the world looks like without you in it? Hasn’t anyone ever put you there?” I really don’t have the words to describe it, perhaps nobody else does either, because no one seems to know what I mean. Maybe worlds don’t exist without words.
Enough situations had arisen by the time I was a late teenager that I thought I just might call up one of the many excellent therapists who had been recommended to me. I had a stack of small pieces of paper with names and numbers—notes handed to me surreptitiously (and with alarming frequency) under tables, in libraries, in banks and even, and especially for some reason, at museums. I was going to ask one of these professionals just what constituted normal. Being wakened by your father in the middle of the night to hold a sheet of plywood over a window as he nails out the darkness?
So I met Lydia Hutchinson MSW who insisted on hugging me at the end of every forty-five minute session—a threatening gesture of outstretched arms which I spent the next six days of every week dreading. She encouraged me to work out my anger with the aid of a plastic orange baseball bat the size of a nurse shark, a photograph of my father poised on a bright purple throw cushion ready for a good bashing. “But I can’t,” I repeated each time. “Maybe I am repressed, but in all likelihood, even if I wasn’t, I hardly think this would be the way I’d choose to express my anger.” A plastic orange object just wouldn’t figure as a weapon of choice in any of my fantasies.
“How would you choose to express your anger then?” she prodded.
“But I’m not even angry!” I protested.
“But if you were?” (Jesus, she wouldn’t relent.)
“I’d tell you to fuck off!” I exclaimed.
“Good!” she congratulated me. “A fantasy!”
“It’s not a fantasy,” I said. “I’m serious.”
“Better!” she exclaimed excitedly. “Transference of your anger!”
I rolled my eyes.
She had a bit of a transference problem herself. She asked me if Christmas was a particularly tense time and whether my father had ever hit my mother while trimming the tree. I couldn’t remember anything like that happening, and although it seemed possible, I was suspicious when she asked me if my father had ever thrust the silver star at my mother to deliberately pierce her hand. I said “no” and she said “the bastard” and we both looked a little confused. She seemed to have a fixation with fluffy white stuffed animals and because she didn’t seem to be relenting on the idea that I take up the orange baseball bat, one day I suggested she take it and do some of her own bashing.
She offered to demonstrate. She picked up the bat and started rhythmically tap-tapping the concrete wall of her subterranean pillow room. She began lightly, but then worked her way up into a monumental crescendo in which she came out with the most startling range of expletives: “You mother-fucking-ass-licking-cock-suck-ing-shit-ass-bugger-squirrel-fuck!” Squirrel? I didn’t like to ask.
I watched her in amazement and revulsion as she collapsed into her beanbag chair with her normally perfect French braid in tatters and a strange smug glow in her eyes.
“Was that good for you?” I mused sarcastically.
“So good,” she sighed, and then burst out laughing. It gave me the creeps.
Needless to say, the experience left me thinking she was less than qualified to offer me much insight into the world of the normal. I had had enough trouble getting myself to her in the first place. Among my father’s most persistent mantras were, “Cheese gives you nightmares”; “Red hair is a sign of inbreeding”; and “Priests fuck you up the asshole, but psychiatrists screw you between the ears.” He had a pretty paranoid, acutely developed understanding of a master race of which he seemed to be the only surviving member. He was sure he was being persecuted by an alliance of Irish Americans and psychiatrists.
—
I was born into a crowded room at St. Mary Abbot’s hospital, South Kensington, in 1968. Born in London into a month of nights and days only distinguishable from one another by degrees of grey. Born in a nation that regarded the delivery of new life as embarrassing and unseemly, that operated a National Health Service which viewed birth as a pathology necessitating a ten-day internment.
In Grade One, when I was given a fresh clean notebook in which to write something called “My Autobiography,” I wrote according to the certainty of the collective narrative: “I was born purple and dead. I was born in England,” as if to imply that birthplace determined birth state. In fact, as my mother describes it, it may well have. I did not burst forth into being. I was pumped into existence by a machine. Although I was the result of premature ejaculation, I was not overly excited about being released into the world.
There are no pictures of Corinna taken while she was pregnant. She was thin as a post and modelling for Debenhams when she discovered the speck within, and she viewed the assault upon her body as both career damaging and soul destroying. She was, however, able to take a certain amount of pride in concealing her pregnancy from the outside world. It was only when she was nine months pregnant and went down to the newsagent’s to buy ten Mars bars at a pop that the truth was revealed. A well-meaning comment from the shopkeeper produced a scream of “Oh my God, I’m pregnant!”, its echo still resounds throughout the streets of South Kensington.
Two weeks later I was reluctantly expelled—mangy and bawling in the bewildered arms of a woman utterly devastated by her demotion from model to mother. By the time Douglas came to visit, she weighed half a stone less than she had before she was pregnant.
“What can I bring you to eat, Corinna? What would you like to eat?” he asked her helplessly.
“What I’d like,” she told him, “is a little bit of chicken,” imagining something delicate and white, skinless, boneless, greaseless and divine.
He cooked her a chicken. Roasted it lathered in pork dripping and delivered it to her the next day in a brown paper bag. She took one look at the grease-stained bag and said meekly, “I’m sorry, Douglas, but I think you’ll have to take it away.” He wasn’t sure if she meant the chicken or the child.
Corinna came home to a house Puff had looked after. “Looked after” was apparently a euphemism for making fudge and leaving sticky marks on windows, or burning pots when cooking eggs for Douglas’s tea. Corinna was furious. As soon as she arrived she thrust baby Thelma into Puff’s arms and grabbed the Hoover for a mad vacuuming as Douglas and his mother stood backed against the wall in fearful amazement.
After that Corinna took to her bed, hating husbands and babies and humankind in general. If it were later in history, someone would have suggested postpartum depression as Corinna thought aloud her murderous thoughts. She dreamed of burying her baby in the back yard. She dreamed of a sunflower rising in the very spot, dreamed of being deceived by its beauty, of feeling regret that perhaps her child might have grown to be as striking and majestic as this flower. But then it turned its face toward her and its seeds began to spill on the ground as it cried out in an eerie, high-pitched wail, “Mummeeee!”
“Douglas!” Corinna screamed into the wicked night. “I can’t stand it anymore! Get rid of it!” The words reached his room at the end of the corridor and precipitated her departure the next day. She would stay with her sister Esmerelda in Edinburgh and would he please do something with the baby.
What he did, as he always did, was call his mother. He drove baby Thelma to Puff and Hugo the peacock farmer’s house in Gloucestershire. Puff was delighted by the opportunity to impose her underutilized parenting skills on her first grandchild. Hugo, however, was not nearly as pleased. “Rug rat,” he muttered as he dragged sawdust from the barn across the carpet, coming in for his tea. “What are you feeding it our good cream for?” he’d shout at Puff. “That’s like wasting roast beef on a bloody dog.”
Eight months later, Corinna returned (a changed woman as the collective narrative has it), bursting to reinstate her claim on motherhood. She declared that her transformation was due to finding, on her return to the farm of her in-laws, that baby Thelma, pale, thin and toothy, had been tied to the bannister. “Bawling like a banshee, she was,” Puff explained to Corinna, by way of justification.
But my mother, in her new-found maternal swell, defended, “It doesn’t matter what she was doing. You can’t just tie the bloody child to a bannister!”
“And a lot of nerve you have then, coming into my house and telling me how to look after the daughter you’ve gone and abandoned. Who’s been up with the child in the middle of the night all these months? You’re not fit to call yourself a mother!” my grandmother shouted.
“She’s my child and I’ve come to take her home,” my mother said, untangling me from the bannister and wrapping me in the wing of her coat.
—
Douglas had missed Corinna terribly. “Pussycat, we’ll do what we can,” he said. “We’ll find a nanny if we have to. Hire some help.” Much to his amazement, she replied, “I want another one. I’m afraid I’ve fucked this one up. Let’s try again.”
The truth was, her new-found maternal disposition had had its gestation elsewhere. In Edinburgh in fact, in the arms of a young solicitor with whom she’d had vigorous and indiscreet encounters for the better part of the last month. Her second birth would also appear to be premature. But this time she was ready, and baby Willy sprang forth according to script. Corinna leapt into motherhood with a vengeance. This baby would be different. It was different—the fruit of some undisclosed liaison, chosen, the affirmation of womanhood, the spawn of passion and secrets.
I was relegated thereafter to the realm of the rather inconvenient. But since my father lived in that realm too, I discovered an ally in him, and when I became two-legged and verbal, became useful to him as well. My job was to collect the chickens’ eggs and help with the feeding of the pigeons. I called our garden the farm, although it was simply a garden in which we kept a small coop. We had moved from London to a small village called Little Slaughter, off the Hog’s Back. We had moved there because my mother, being a rather spoiled daughter, asked Daddy for the down payment on a house. She was sick of the brown flat in London, sick of being reminded every day of lives she might otherwise be living as she wheeled Willy’s pram past shop windows full of glamorous mannequins. “I could have been like that,” she had sighed. Ah, to be thin, manicured and bloodless.
There were no shop windows in the village to remind her of anything but the grim present. In fact, there were no shops, no school or library, nor the faintest display of neighbourly goodwill toward the newly arrived family. There were seven small houses at the foot of a grand manor house and a tiny eleventh-century church. Ours was the smallest of the thatched cottages, shrouded in roses and wrapped in wisteria and so very very picture postcard English in my memory of it. But it was a house bought with Grandpa Harry’s new money and herein lay the problem with our reception. New money was bad enough, but this new money was not even our own.
We were ostracized. There must have been some official village decree stating that the neighbours’ children were not to play with me. My mother was terribly lonely without a soul in sight to be impressed by or adoring of her, so the task fell exclusively to Willy the cherub. My father drove the Mini to Guildford station every day and took the train into London where he had a job he described as “taking fat gits to lunch.” These he saturated with gin and tonics and then put on the train back to their wives in Hammersmith, leaving himself enough time for an hour’s kip in the park before making his way back to the ad agency. He hated every moment of it, as he frequently reminded us.
We all sought salvation through imaginary friends. Daddy’s was a secretary named Teresa. I knew, because sometimes he would come into my room at bedtime and say, “Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend we are at work, and I am your boss and you are my secretary named Teresa.” He’d sit on my bed and I would pretend that I was typing. I liked to do that—my fingers tickety-tacketing across an imaginary keyboard.
“And what does Teresa do when the boss comes into the room?” he’d ask me. “That’s right,” he’d say. “She closes her eyes and opens her mouth and the boss gives her a nice kiss.” And he’d stick his smoky tongue in my mouth and I would feel his bristly face. I didn’t like that part, but I liked most of the rest of being Teresa. Especially when Daddy gave me a tiny bottle of perfume and said, “This is what Teresa wears. Why don’t you put it on every night before Daddy comes to kiss you goodnight.”
My mother had Peter. Peter was the pretend man who called her on the phone. I knew, because the phone would ring, “ring ring,” and Mummy, still in her nightgown, would answer it and giggle low and wrap her arm around her waist and lean back in her chair and say, “Oh Peter.” One day she saw me looking at her quizzically and said, after she had hung up, “Thelma—haven’t you got anything better to do? You’ve got your imaginary friends, why don’t you go and play with Ginniger and leave me to play with mine?”
“Is Peter pretend?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she sighed. “Peter is pretend.” And I knew what she meant. Pretend people were secret people.
I did have “better things to do,” as a matter of fact. I had tea parties and burial ceremonies to attend. I had my imaginary friends—Ginniger, Janawee and Heroin, and Teddy and my favourite doll, Blondie, with the outrageous hair. It was my job to round up the silent troops, make sure their hair was brushed, and pour the tea. Little chairs were arranged around Bah the blue blanket, the table for the tiny tea service that soaked up its water and our conversations. Sometimes we played office.
A year later I was sitting in a waiting room by myself with some dolls I had never met before, waiting for Mummy to finish her doctor’s appointment. I said to Ginniger, “These dolls are naughty secretaries. And you know what that means. Help me tie them to the chairs, Ginniger.” We took off their knickers but there was no rope in the waiting room, so the best I could do was rip out some of their long hair with my teeth and tie them down with their own nylon fibres.
That night Daddy didn’t come to say goodnight. He was busy with Mummy downstairs in the kitchen, dodging flying plates. “You bastard!” she screamed. “Where the hell did she get the idea of naughty secretaries! What have you done to her?”
I hugged Teddy, and whispered to Heroin at the top of the stairs. “Oh no, Heroin, Mummy knows the secret. Do something.” Heroin, as silent and stoic as ever, motioned to me to climb on her back. She is my horse sometimes when we are afraid and she takes me galloping so hard and fast that the ground looks like a green river. She has thick heavy hooves that crush flowers and bad people and when I turn my head to look behind us I see trampled irises and squashed brains.
Not only did Mummy know about the secretaries, but so did a psychiatrist named Dr. Reginald Knowles who watched me play through the glass at the Guildford hospital. Corinna took me there after her sister Esmerelda had been to visit. I liked Esmerelda. She was bigger and softer than Mummy, and her voice was sweet and soothing. She cooked Willy and me crêpes with lemon and icing sugar when Mummy was in bed having a migraine. And then she asked me, “What would you like to do today?” I led her by the hand into the garden and introduced her to the pigeons. There were twelve of them, special ones with Elizabethan ruffs around their necks, each of them known to me by name. She said nice things like, “Well, she’s a pretty bird,” and I said, “How do you know it’s a girl?” and she answered, “Well, because it’s so pretty.”
“The girls are the ones with the tight fannies,” I pointed out to her, and then Auntie Esme said she felt a little flushed and could use a nice cup of tea.
In my bedroom she tried to squish herself into the chair that Janawee was already sitting in. “Oh no, Auntie Esme,” I winced. “That’s Janawee’s chair!” I saw Janawee sliding down under the threat of obliteration.
Auntie Esme said, “Sorry, petal, can I sit in that one?”
“Well, normally that’s where Heroin sits, but Heroin will sit here on Bah just for today.”
“And who else have we got here with us?” Auntie Esme asked with interest.
“Ginniger. And Teddy and Blondie. Janawee’s the baby so she doesn’t talk yet. She doesn’t even have any teeth yet. Heroin’s the biggest. She is bigger than me. And Ginniger is in the middle.”
Heroin was the biggest, the bravest, the most grownup. She slept apart from us in the cupboard under the staircase and she knew the alphabet and copied down letters meticulously in a blue-lined book with MY NAME IS … written on the cover. Heroin was teaching me the alphabet, although sometimes she lost patience with me and told me that I was too old to “behave like such a baby,” but usually she just nodded and shook her head without words.
Janawee really was the baby. She had shoulder-length blonde braids on either side of her head and a little pink flower of a mouth. She would only eat burnt toast with Marmite. She cried an awful lot because she was scared of almost everything and she was as small and fragile as a baby bird and slept nestled in my underarm at night because she was afraid of the ghoulies that lived under the bed. I was afraid of them too, and I would pull myself into a little ball so they couldn’t reach out and nibble my toes.
Ginniger was, well, just like me. Somewhere in the middle. Sometimes a mother to Teddy and Blondie and Janawee, sometimes Heroin’s baby girl, sometimes Daddy’s naughty secretary, sometimes his pet, sometimes Mummy’s little inconvenience, sometimes Daddy’s little helper, sometimes Willy’s sister, Auntie Esme’s petal, or Grannie Puff’s big girl now, but always rather moody and timid and quiet. She said very little and she rarely, if ever, laughed.
Although it was Heroin I talked to, it was Ginniger who just was. We never had to talk because we would only say exactly the same thing. There were either two mes—Thelma and Ginniger—or one me in two bodies, but either way we were inseparable and indistinguishable to others except by name. Only I seemed to know who was talking.
“We like to play office,” I confided in Auntie Esme.
“And how do we play office?” she asked with interest.
“Well, Daddy is the boss and we are the secretaries,” I told her. “And we do this,” I said, pretending to type, to make the tickety-tackety noise of fingers moving across keys. “And we answer the phone and make cups of tea.”
“Well, you must make a decent living,” said Auntie Esme approvingly.
“Uh huh,” I nodded. “And when we do a good job, the boss says, Well that’s a job well done Miss so-and-so. Here’s a little present for my helpful little secretary, and he gives us a new pen or some perfume and we thank him by giving him a big kiss.”
“What kind of kiss?” asked Auntie Esme.
“Like this,” I said. And I closed my eyes and opened my mouth like a goldfish, just like Daddy had taught me.
“Oh, that kind of kiss,” Auntie Esme said knowingly. “But what happens if you don’t do a good job?” she asked.
“Well, sometimes he says, Miss so-and-so, I think you’ve made an error in typing this correspondence. I think you’ll have to lie down while I discipline you.”
“And then what happens?” she whispered, her eyes widening encouragingly.
“I do what the boss says because that’s my job.”
“What’s your job?” she prodded.
“Like I told you. Just typing and answering the phone and stuff like that.”
“And lying down?” she persisted.
“Only when I’ve made an error. I do sometimes because like Daddy says, to err is human. And even secretaries are human. Even good ones are naughty sometimes.”
“And what happens after you lie down?” she asked.
“Then I fall asleep and have a dream.”
“And what’s your dream about?” she asked gravely.
“About a flying insect,” I said, sweeping my arm from the floor to the ceiling. “A dragonfly with a skinny skinny twig of a body. I am an insect floating up in the room and I stick up here,” (indicating) “on the wall above my pillow and just look down. I feel very high up because I am only a tiny insect and I am afraid of being so high and my bed and the room look so big. And when the noise gets too loud I just suck in my breath really hard and my eyes turn inside my head and all I see is big red.”
—
I felt very nervous after telling Auntie Esme. I knew I’d done a bad thing because the secretaries, like Peter, were supposed to be a secret. And now I knew what happened when secrets were broken. Mum threw plates at Dad in the kitchen and then she threw a chair and he said, “I think you’ve broken my bloody thumb!”
And she screamed, “How could you do this, Douglas! You’re sick—do you know that—you’re positively sick!”
dilettantes