Mouthing the Words Read online

  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.

  By turns harrowing and wonderfully funny, Mouthing the Words tells Thelma’s story of sexual abuse, anorexia, borderline multiple personality disorder and her return to England. Reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson and Sylvia Plath, Mouthing the Words is a remarkable and inspiring fiction debut.

  Copyright © 1999 Camilla Gibb

  Anchor Canada e-book edition published 2013

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada is a registered trademark.

  Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-68204-6

  Cover photo by Chris Frazer Smith.

  Mouthing the Words is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  About the Author

  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 i
t 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.