Only Words

To be completely honest I wasn’t exactly sure why I let him do what he liked. I guess I was used to it- all the men I have ever had in my life have done just as they pleased and he was no different. My father did it to my mother and to me; drinking away our money and eating into our savings. It’s no wonder I used to be the school joke. They had everything and I was the poor kid with the drunk father. My family has always been a joke. We were never a family, just a joke. My husband came and went as he wished and I didn’t bother trying to intervene. I was only the woman after all, only there to make the meals and clean the toilet. And now my son was at it.

There had been a time when I thought he was going to escape the Bradshaw curse. I would look at him and try to spot the signs but I couldn’t. Not until it was too late. He left school at sixteen and told me he didn’t want to work. So I agreed. Actually I didn’t agree, I didn’t do anything and he took it that I didn’t mind and he sat down in the armchair and turned on the tv. It seems like he hasn’t gotten out of that armchair in a year, I’m surprised he hasn’t pitched a tent. I’ve gotten used to cleaning round him.

The other man in my life, my lover, is the same as my husband but with more hair. He calls me when his wife bores him and he’s been spending too much time with the kids. They were a mistake, he tells me, she was a mistake. A nasty, irreversable mistake. I assume he hasn’t heard of divorce. I used to hate kept women, mistresses of married men with children. I thought they had a bare faced cheek, they were hussies. I was wrong about that. I am too normal to be a hussy. I’m just a housewife with a lover. Nothing out of the ordinary. You see worse things on those Ibiza Uncovered programs. I wonder whether or not the Broadcasting Commission has actually watched those programs.

If you saw me in the street, well you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t be a she, I’d be a them. Different from you but the same as everyone else. You wouldn’t look at me and ask yourself what my life was like, what had I done. You wouldn’t even see me. I have one of those faces, or so I’m told. Blank, unreadable. They say eyes are the windows to the soul. There is nothing in my eyes. Believe me I have looked. There is nothing there. No charactor, no smiles, no saddness. Like I’d never lived. Did that mean I had no soul. Probably.

I have ten GCSES at A grade. Not that anyone has ever asked. I’ve worked two jobs in my entire life so I’ve never needed them. My husband doesn’t know about them, they aren’t his so I’ve never felt the need to tell him. And what could he tell me that I couldn’t tell myself? I’ve read so many books I could open a talking library. Words spin around in my head, forming themselves into sentences, into paragraphs, into pages. I have no control over them, they do it without my knowing. One second I’m thinking about my shopping list and the next I am scrolling down a page of words, am in the middle of a story. Is it a talent? Or a curse? Maybe it’s both.

I wrote when I was a child. My favourite colour was green so I only wrote in green crayon. I still have some of the pages but they aren’t any good. Crayon is unreadable at the best of times and a six year old child’s handwriting skills are questionable. Besides, I know what they say. When I was that age I listened to what my head was telling me, I wrote down the words. Now I have more time than ever to write but instead I blot the words out. I ignore them, I focus on other things. I don’t like the way they form into sentences, the way they do it themselves. I used to wonder whether that was normal, if everyone else’s words did that. I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t.

What scares me the most- and this didn’t seem to bother me as a child- is that everytime I find myself in a story in my head, it’s always about me. It’s my story, someone is writing about me. And it’s always the same story. Of course it’s involved different people as my situation has changed but the plot is basically the same. It was like someone was writing my life for me, telling me how the next chapter should go. I never followed the plot, everytime I thought of it I did something else entirely. I empowered me, made me feel like I could control the words.

Let me tell you something about words. They are dangerous, more dangerous than most realise. They make things happen, whether or not they are spoken. People say that if you just think something, if you don’t say it, then nothing bad can happen. But that’s all they need. Once you think about them, you give them opportunity. And there isn’t any turning back. Once I realised this I began to ignore the words, I refused to give them opportunity. But it was too late for me. I had entertained the words once and it was only a matter of time before they made me listen.

I lasted an impressively long time, I was strong for the first time in my life. I was married and had a child before I broke. You know when you step on the hosepipe as the water is flowing through and there is this huge build up of water that grows and grows? And it either bursts the pipe, proving you were stronger, or keeps building until you weaken and loosen your grip, thus letting it win. And the build up is so great that when you let go the water shoots out in a torrant. That’s what happened. I blotted the words out and they built. And when I could blot them out no longer they attacked me from every angle, forcing me into action. They had their opportunity, they came in their thousands. They knew they were going to get it easy. And within a few minutes, a few measly minutes, they had written my next chapter.

So here I am, sitting hunched over the table wracking my brain. There is a single piece of white paper sitting in front of me, a pen in my hand. I am trying to think of the words but I can’t. There isn’t a single letter printed on my page because I have no words. They came, they wrote, they went. They decided my fate and left me to deal with it. I had tried summoning them to me, tried to make them form in my head but it was no use. I had no power over them.

I looked through to the livingroom, I saw everything, I knew what everything was and what had happened but I couldn’t write it down. My husband, my son, my lover were in the livingroom. I knew that, I could see them, but I couldn’t write it. I couldn’t explain that it was the words. I couldn’t tell whoever found this that I had only done it because the words had planned it.

And besides who would believe me? They’d write me off as another repressed housewife, so put down and lonely that she snapped. Words had no power, they would say, they can’t do what you did. And how would I reply? I would nod. I would let them believe that. And I would know, as they frog marched me to a cell, that it was only a matter of time. I would smile at the wardens as they scowled at me, I would study them. I would play a game, ask myself who was next. Where would the words strike next?

I am putting down my pen, I am leaving my piece of paper clean. You can’t write down the power of words, you just know it. And everyone would know it soon enough. Because, eventually, the words get to everyone. And now you have read my thoughts you have to ask yourself. When will it be your turn?