Coming Undone Terri White (ebook pc reader TXT) 📖

of my mouth coming back up from where it had just landed. I kept swallowing, gasping for air, being saved, even when I was sure I was being killed.

That night was the night of my first blackout. I don’t remember putting down the glass, saying goodnight, walking up the stairs away from their continuing screams, going to the toilet, wiping between my legs, taking off my trousers, taking off my top, putting on my nightie, getting into bed and closing my eyes. But I must have done those things, or at least some of them, just like I did every night.

My mum woke me just before seven a.m. for my shift in the café in town where I was a £1.88-an-hour Saturday girl. I heard her voice saying my name, telling me to get up, coming at me from far away, somewhere I couldn’t initially see or reach. When it finally did arrive, it was coupled with nausea, which distracted from the pain of the grip on my skull, the handle slowly turning, the nuts, the bolts tightening, closing the gaps in the cracks. I rode the bus to work, clutched my insides in place over every bump. I’d barely got my white apron tied at the base of my back with a bow before I was throwing up on the cobbles of the alley out back. As I spat on the stone, watching what I thought had saved me running downhill into the pavement cracks while trying to avoid the splashback of sick on my shoes, I knew that drinking wasn’t for me, however much I lusted after oblivion. The lack of control. The primal forces that took over my body when it was forced to vomit against my will: stomach tightened, mouth open, teeth bared as whatever was in my gut hurtled up through my throat and out into the air with zero cooperation from me. Eyes bulged, fists gripped, muscles stiffened as my body fought what it must do. I vowed: drinking wasn’t for me. A vow that I was to keep for several years – touching barely a drop, never ever more than three drinks in one night – until I discovered that, actually, drinking was very much for me.

CHAPTER 11

Our house always felt sticky with sex, with lust. It was in the fabric of the carpet, the paint on the walls, always hanging in the air. I knew that Mum was attractive, that men found her sexy. Lots of men. ‘They say I’ve got the best bum in the village,’ she’d say with a smile.

Saturday night. She’d allow me to be her confidante, her friend, from the moment she ran her bath. I sat on the toilet and talked to her as the water and foam gently lapped her breasts, which had settled down next to her armpits. As I got older, I knew that women’s bodies were meant to curve in and out in specific places and that, when that happened, men would like you and want to be with you.

I remember times when she called to me, got me to hook her into her stockings and suspenders, worn under her leather skirt on the nights she seemed happiest. After she got dressed, she would be in the kitchen, head down, blow-drying her permed blonde hair until it was big enough, spraying its bombast into place.

Those were the best nights. The house became slowly infused with new smells, warmth, hustle and bustle. The sharp edges softened, became buttery. It began when the immersion heater was switched on – a very rare treat. We were under strict instructions to use it only in an emergency – we couldn’t afford it – though I was never quite sure what would constitute an emergency. As the water in the tank tucked into the corner of my bedroom started to simmer, then bubble and boil, Mum’s excitement levels rose.

The kitchen smelled of bubble bath and Elnett and perfume and make-up. She was scarlet-cheeked with excitement and optimism. Anything could happen after she exited the door and was free from us, from that house. I knew that it was this that flooded her eyes with light, that pressed the switch inside her. The nights when she was not our mum, she was just Jane.

It started to become clear to me how suffocated she felt by motherhood, by us. Her identity permanently erased before she’d properly been able to form her own. If you become a mother at sixteen, you’re barely an adult, barely a person. Sister, daughter, now wife and mother. When did she get to be her own woman? Every time she looked at us, she was reminded of what she’d sacrificed, lost, never ever had.

I looked at my own body as it changed, and felt so far away from being a woman, that kind of woman. I was plonked onto the dining-room chair, a stained towel around my shoulders, as she undid the boxes that contained perming lotion and bleach. She worked away to put my hair in permanent tight, tight curls and paint it with streaks of yellow. The end of the plastic hook dug into my skull while it retrieved strands of hair for her to stain. I knew I was nothing to look at; I felt she wanted me to look better than I did naturally. And under her hands, as I sensed her stare shifting to something edging towards approval, it seemed like I was becoming someone people might look at. That people might actually see.

Men liked Mum, liked what they saw when they looked at her. And it seemed as though there were always men in our house. Sometimes they’d be there for years, other times months. Sometimes weeks, nights, hours. The men my mum beckoned over the threshold came in every shape, every size, type, taste. There were lovers, boyfriends, fiancés, friends and husbands – both other people’s and her own.

Mum’s speciality appeared to be men