I left 24 years ago.
I can’t remember why. It’s Easter. It’s winter. Is it the one where I have the tonsillitis? Where she says I’m depressed and they have to be kind. So they come and hiss and snigger at the door. Telling me what was told secretly. Like the letter he wrote his colleague with the diagnosis he hadn’t said to me. Behind me.
How did I get the job? Newspaper advert, performing polite and clean. Pretending I wasn’t interested at all in education. Imposter, the other Natasha had the £110 a week to get ready for the baby she carried. We’re 17 and on the market.
Not sure what I’m doing with my life. Didn’t fit at sixth form. That’s the story. No not like one of those damn students that will fuck off back to college after the summer. I left September 14. She said, you’ve really got something you should go get an education. The Natashas parted.
I couldn’t revisit them and the lie. Trying to buy the cheap tights, I’d sneak past their stall. Remembering the belonging, pretending I like milky tea in styrofoam and extra value cigarettes. Calling out morning to the colleagues in the echo of visionless modernisation that kept us warm and had real space for buggies and mobility scooters.
Chittlings, haslet, savoury duck. New words and foods to learn. Cover your hand with the white plastic bag and squish the innards up into your fist. Orders in ounces but we’re supposed to be using grams. Awkward, the people who talk, walk, look like this had terrorised me since I came here. My body knew about some debt I carried, the ancestors had made me to ensure I didn’t ever work on a market again. She said it too, You should do something with your life, but why shouldn’t she too? How were we different. They kept shoving me up – the ones who pushed me down the stairs said, You think you’re better than us.
I want to hold these woman. Sob together for the sistering that was forbidden.
Why did I leave? Was it because I never got a part in the school play. I’d performed Rizzo with the depth and clarity you’re not allowed at 16. Older than her years they say. They knew what I’d seen to be made old. The ingenue was rehired instead.
They’d promised respect as we became students, pupils no more. The first ever sixth form. New uniforms, a common room, listening. Empty commitments. Or maybe full, when known from the deficit they carried. They bore us to be the free ones then forgot how horizons shift.
I tested the uniform, the listening, the commons. They told me I was there to help the others, to sell my curiosity to those who don’t want to think so that the exams are passed. They told me it was different when my skirt tilted between the hips that knew. Different to her, a woman categorised as other as child still. I was making desire happen in the bodies of the men who were supposed to know more than me. And she? I want to dance with you C. Be joyful body sisters again.
You saw me. You asked me, crossing the new gap made because now you’re a man. “Are you okay?” I keep the truth to myself but I’m eased by somebody wanting to know.
When did I leave him? I was dancing girl. I was joy. This is what it was like back when we played dress up and I nearly pissed myself at the door because of your ladybird pencil sharpener outfit. Your tender effort to recreate the little thing from your pencil case into human scale, your determination to make it and come here despite a journey under shameful glances.
We packed that joy up and then two years later it was there in the dancing, the feel of the lace tights and the satin shirt shifting and shifting. The light, the rejoicing to the dark sweat dripping ceiling. But your joy had been taken long ago, they needed you to be made desperate for drops. Droughted. Because we all had to perform this game that nobody knew where it came from.
You write songs about me. A complement except it was about something else. I was always joy. But I believed your shame just like you’d been schooled too. You taught me about music. About all the fantasies the joy theft had corrupted into. We forgot the times we were part of. Replicating our parents times in new clothes for them to admire and reject. Make sure the war bitterness is never tasted and spat out.
I remember why I left. All my mothers had died.
Before she passed she said “are you on the pill, just don’t get pregnant”. She told me how she didn’t want me, didn’t want to be my mother. I want to hold you sister, you needed one and I was all you could make.
She was mad about the taxi I took home from the most beautiful man. He’d watched me touch the velvet, try on the red shirt with the perfectly pointed collar. The one we took off in his surprisingly suburban house. He was careful. Blood, but nobody to show the sheets to. She didn’t notice. Busy with the risk to life from the taxi ride, the journey from the disappointment of the Adonis shamed out of his desire. The journey with the taste of freedom in the musk of muddled bodies.
I found a new one to tell me “you’re better than this”. Another mother with such a small idea of herself.
There was one who carried an idea of herself filled out to her skin. Maybe. I don’t trust the eyes that saw an Adonis in the dulled boy. But I want those eyes, to see what’s beyond what’s arrived already.
I left because Jess had died and it meant little to me. Everyone else was so upset about how glorious she was. We read the prayer of the colonial patriarchy to honour her. But I knew a woman with no voice and a vacant weariness. I hadn’t had enough time with her beyond the daughters that weren’t wanted.
And I remember and she’s been with me here, with me always. Because she knows how to pray, how to pay attention, how to carry your uncleanness with you as a memorial to what was taken.
I left when it got too shallow. They never forgave me for reminding them that you can leave. They glossed my determination and inferred experience. They took pride in the choices they’d made for me.
Fuck you. Go back to where you come from. You are the displaced, far from your desire and pallid at the enormity. I belong here, to this and I never left.
– -/////
Listen to me talk about more of my work on reclamation projects on Artcountability, search your podcast app for us or listen here. The video performance where this project began is here.
