I live in a world that is muffled for sound and touch and taste and my son helps me navigate it.
I shout too loudly. You do shout when you have the cotton wool, but others hear you too much.
I get stressed – scared and I rage – and then the silence sounds HUGE. I look around and see that noone is there. Isolation is deafening and painful.
I am trapped inside a glass prison. Its invisible layers are ice and as I thaw my limbs will ache and throb.
I don’t know why I am buried in cotton wool or trapped inside ice? I don’t know when it happened but I remember as a kid, two sets of eyes peering through a fence saying they wouldn’t play with me and to go away. Other girls at school in groups stung me like bees. Bully. Kick. Leave out. Shun.
I see people like me when I am inside swarms – the ones left out.
I dance with the swarms for a while until they discover me…. and kick me out.
So, who are the bees?
I don’t know them. I am stuck under water seeing misty distorted faces with no expressions that I can read. Soundless. Do they hear me? I cannot tell.
After their stings I wake to a world where even the trees seem to not know me.
Everything hollers ‘You are not welcome’ – yes you. And I do not know my own story or my own reflection – because I cannot bear to look.
The name of the game is, ‘you’re bad – you’re angry’ – but I looked and I saw no blood on my hands.
I remember the terror – slipping back under dark water. I remember the cold and how it burned me. That I chose to forget when my boy-friend left me– to tell myself our love was fake anyway.
And I hate all women and I hate all men – why shouldn’t I hate bees? Sting loving, swarm loving little critters that don’t like me.
Sometimes I hate the trees because the trees are meant for them and do not seem to know me.
I know the swarm can see colours – I know this world colours up when they buzz past back to the hive.
Will it be better for me in another world, in the next world ….in the hereafter? Why is this world theirs?
In the silence sometimes if I keep very still I can hear something – he is in the brush of a breeze on my cheek and the sudden appearance of the sun. He is underneath when I walk barefoot on warm grass and he is in the smiles of my son when he comes back to me, in old photographs and the touch of the hand of someone who cares.
I stay in the silence for long times – not fearing – letting pain of this world and the stings wash over me like a wave and then inside some kind of rhythm – I can feel HIM for sure. But He is not of this world.
I know there are others like me. Not fully inside things here.
Not marching to the hum, the hum that exists inside this castle of existence.
And sometimes I believe that we, not of the HUM, are refined in pain ready to rise when the time comes and seize the world as ours and the trees will then look green to us – from grey to green because He will descend and then this will be our end game, our war, our Ragnorak… our Twilight of the Gods.
My life began in ‘Crusades of Rescue,’ kid’s home in London. I thrived amongst the Jesuits and the Sisters who made us clean and cook and train for careers in the wider world. I became known as the industrious girl who tended their caged conures and their caged love-birds.
The other kids became my close family. A student called James Fairer came to study the emotionally deprived kids.
When I turned sixteen I felt as if my feelings were locked up inside of me. I felt trapped inside a prison of ice where others couldn’t reach me. Yet I was an open house with no boundaries and anyone could use me.
When James went to the Sudan to work, I waited in a homeless hostel and realised I needed him; I had no idea how to support myself and I was scared of ending up a prostitute like some of the other girls like Kerry who had slashed her wrists and so I vowed I'd do anything bar ending up like Kerry.
James' Father was ex-military and his new firm needed young girls to do surveillance and office work. When he came back he encouraged me to apply for the position as a trainee private eye at 57, a firm of ex-soldiers. I was always in awe of ex public school, James - his looks - Dirk Bogarde; his air of mystery and unreachability. I heard things about him at 57, that he killed with his bare hands - that he was ruthless and powerful. None of these things matched with the James I knew as a child who looked so alike to delicate and genteel, Dirk Bogarde.
I got the job and 57 taught me how to trace missing people and use a car to tail a mark. At the home they discovered I had a bit of what people call a second sight; I knew things others didn’t, an empathic feeling for what other people felt, I had visions that would often come true, I spoke to spirits and used psychometry, yet I made bad eye contact, I was impractical and easily led. My life was empty because my relationships often failed. I had no idea why. Lack of trust maybe or I’d give too much then feel bad and confuse others by being cross.
I stomached the loneliness and I grew used to it. The job fitted a loner. Always undercover using another name – I found more confidence as Rachel or Mary or Suzy – anything bar being myself. I hated Christine; my birth name had been Lucy - so neither were a fit; one given by a Mother who had left me on Church steps - the other one who had beat me. They both seemed like hate names.
I knew life’s joy probably lay in love and relationships, yet I couldn’t share my body with anyone; I was unable to let go and trust. I knew I needed an answer.
I found a book in my adopted Mother’s drawer. The book was all about the Moors Murderer, serial killer, Ian Brady and I felt intrigued why a young man of 25 would rape and kill. My adoptive father was good looking and sexually abused me, so maybe it was a way of working out why he was a paedophile.