Coming Undone Terri White (ebook pc reader TXT) 📖

who shouldn’t be there, who would pay the price for coming over. Who would turn up, invited, in the middle of the day. I remember walking in the back door and hearing a man grunting. Headboards and floorboards banged. I slammed a door to let them know that I was home, that – Christ, anyway, it was only 3.30 p.m. The men who were there at strange hours were oftentimes men I knew. A man whose wife eventually rang the house and told me to tell Mum to leave her husband alone. The men parked their cars at the bottom of our street, letting the world know that they were there to knock on number ten’s door.

I can recall no formal introduction (or any other kind) to those who stuck around in the morning – there would just be a strange man walking down the stairs. They all seemed to stink of booze and fags and look at us like we were intruding, even though it was our home. They were at home immediately, boots under the table. They filled the entire sofa in the front room, took charge of the remote control, filled the house with smoke and rage. Faces appeared hard against us, three children they didn’t want, but made peace with accepting so they could be with Mum, for however long or short a time that might be. In the morning, they eyed us warily, seemingly wondering in the cold light of day if they had made the right choice. Wondering whether there was another option, whether we were really around for good, whether we were really immovable. When they were gone, when it was just us again, I breathed. I exhaled. I wished, prayed, elbows apart, for there to be no more men. But just days, weeks later they were back again and it was no longer only us. And I felt a new kind of terror in familiar skin inside our house.

As a teenager, I felt ashamed, dirty by association. How could Mum do this to me? How could she do this to other women? To children? I hated her with a violence and fever I didn’t know I was capable of. She disgusted me. It seemed to me that she gave away her body too easily to men who weren’t hers, men whom she couldn’t always name.

As an extension of my hatred for her, I hated myself. I became obsessed with how much I hated my face. Not the kind of flippant, lightly held hate that occasionally irritated and wrinkled the skin. But the kind that was felt constantly: when it wasn’t burning right behind your eyes turning them red, it was sitting in the pit of your stomach, swilling and swirling, lapping against your insides, corroding them with each backwash. I never, ever didn’t feel it. And even though I barely recognised my own face, I still hated it. Each time I caught a glimpse in a window, a mirror, sliced in the back of a fork, I was shocked anew. Surprised by the circle of flesh looking back. Who was she? What was she? Sometimes, no matter how hard I looked, I simply wasn’t there to see. There was just nothing. These were also my favourite times.

When I could, I would lock myself in the bathroom, both desperate and unwilling to spend some time getting to know my own face. I stood in front of the mirror set into the cabinet screwed into the wall. I traced the outline of my own face with my fingers and thumbs. Running from my hairline at my forehead down both sides, past my ears, around and under my chin, up over my nose and eyelids until I was back where I started. Taking one flat hand, I ran it over my skull, traversing the raised bump made of bone and flesh that had sat there since I couldn’t remember when. Then, courage summoned, I headed for the bit I hated the most. The three moles that sat in an almost perfect triangle across my face. One on the right between my mouth and chin, two on the left: one tucked between my nose and my upper lip, the other by the bottom. I ran a single finger over them, feeling their tougher outline. They made me feel physically sick. The brown dots stuck on my face. The reason I kept my head down, always faced the floor, was terrified of looking anyone directly in the face. I took the face-pack sample I’d found in the back of the cabinet, squeezed the white paste out onto my fingers and smeared it as thickly as camouflage paint onto my face.

I began with the moles, dabbing on top of the brown until it was gone. Mesmerised by the simple beauty of my face without them, I kept going further and further from the brown, smearing the white wider and higher, wider and higher until I reached my ears, my hairline, my neck. I looked in the mirror, my nose, cheeks, chin, all features obliterated. I looked so beautiful, finally.

CHAPTER 12

Getting away was the only possible solution. The furthest place away from home I knew was London – and the only way I could think of to get there was by going to university. The first person in my family to stay in education after sixteen, I was met with rolled eyes at home and the assertion that ‘we can’t afford to support you’. Fuck it: I was going.

I spent the years before leaving home for good holding myself together – barely – by my fingertips. Home was still a battlefield. I was weary. After we ended up in emergency accommodation without beds or hot water, on an estate far rougher than ours, while the latest bad marriage behind the door of number ten was imploding, I went to live with my glorious nana.

My focus was laser-sharp: I had to pass my exams. I