Misery Memoir

It had to come to this eventually. How could any joyous romp turn out all right. There is an inevitable low point, a 'poor me' and 'how badly wronged'. They call them misery memoirs and it is almost impossible to have a memoir without the miserable bit, even if it is a hooked on a thorn, abandoned, bloodied scrap of fabric from a fine silk gown.

In the shape of things it should be left till last because that is where it ended. The joyous dancer crashing into the thorny bush leaving me bruised and winded for a number of years to come. The dark patch that followed, the time without skin, another story perhaps but not one that I will bore you with.

The following is tedious enough and I'll tell it now and out of order because its best to get it over with.

His name wasn't Peter, but I'll call him that. A sad man, all low status slumping shoulders and visible ticks. Ugly too. A crooked moon face and old, when I was still bursting out of childhood. I slept with him because I thought that no one else would. I pictured myself in his scuffed and ugly shoes, directionless despite his advanced years, stray pup. He wasn't terribly smart or witty and he was poor. He owned a battered car and only one key and I gave him a bed out of fondness for the down-and-out.

He had a habit of arguing whilst driving. He liked to close his eyes and lean on the accelerator and yell that he would kill us both. I used to laugh. Death was just one more adventure that I wasn't afraid of. There was no beckoning future. I read Camus and Sartre. I walked on sleepless nights through parks and beside railway lines. I flirted with death as passionately as I flirted with life. His screwed up face and his shouting made me giggle. He never crashed the car, but now I know how dangerous his behaviour must have been. I should have kicked him back onto the streets but I didn't. For a while he had no power over me. I watched him eat and I felt pity, a man cradling his plate as if I might suddenly lunge across the table and remove a snow pea from his hungry mouth.

He was brutal in his powerlessness. He picked out women I knew and pointed to them just out of earshot. 'She is more beautiful than you,' 'she is more feminine', 'she is the kind of nature-girl I prefer, you are all steel edges and cracked concrete', 'you would never be my choice if I had one', 'you are the consolation prize and I like every other woman I see more than you'.

He wore me away one niggle at a time. Of course I believed him. I knew that they were more beautiful, more girlish, more mysterious than me. I liked them too. I shared his fascination with the other women. I looked at myself and the facts of my body were written in the mirror. Not beautiful. Not lovely, but still someone who enjoys the world through every pore. He couldn't criticise me for that. The other girls seemed to step back from themselves and the world and I dove straight into it. I felt that this blind forward motion might have its own attractions - unstoppable force, fierce advocate, fiercer lover, fiercest friend.

It was the night that Peter wanted to make love to that other girl. She was flirting with him. She flirted with everyone and unlike the others, he chose to see her flirtation as a curled finger, beckoning him closer. I was at the party too, invisible beside him. I watched her reel him in and I was jealous.

I left the party early, drawing my own conclusions. At home I refused to fume. I lit candles, poured myself a shot of vodka, read a book and felt the wave of calm envelope me. I went to bed at a reasonable hour but when he opened the door I was awake.

I said no. I said that I didn't want to. I said I don't like this. I struggled just a little. I tried to remove my hands from his fists and it seemed to be his weight that pinned me but of course it wasn't. I was powerless because he told me I was hideous with each thrust, and with each thrust I believed him.

'I'd be fucking her if I could' he said, 'you are nothing in comparison, easy ride, not the same class of woman' and I found myself suddenly unable to argue, unable to struggle my hands out from the place he had raised them to above my head. He came even though he wasn't wearing a condom and the next day I was lead on the sheets, a monument to my fallen self.

He bought me a dozen red roses and told me he had never bought anybody flowers before and I thanked him for it. This terrible double-crossing of myself. This is what I regret more than anything.

He stopped yelling at me in the car. I no longer had the energy to disagree with him. I had been someone who had enjoyed the world through every pore but now I found I had no skin. I let him climb on top and I wondered what had once held me together because now I was sagging into pieces on the bed.

He left me for a woman I had once loved soon after that. She was more lovely than I could ever be. I had loved her for it. He loved her for it too.

And then there was that time when I sat in the park night after night and did nothing about finding somewhere to crawl into, out of the rain. That lank and listless time that would be the guts of the misery memoir if I could write that kind of thing.

It was the end of the story for a while, and when a little girl pointed and yelled for her mother to 'look at that lady', I heard instead 'you are nothing compared to every other woman', and I sat back down on my park bench and busied myself with the effort of breathing in and out, making sure I kept trudging through my life one day after the next.