How to Build a Girl

  He springs off the bed, and rolls up my shirt-sleeve.

  ‘Fucking hell. Bleeding. Right,’ he says, business-like. ‘We need a tourniquet.’

  He goes to his drawer, and takes his school tie out, and ties it around my upper-arm.

  ‘Put your arm up in the air,’ he says. ‘It will stop the bleeding. Christ, you reek of whisky.’

  Absolutely mute, I do as he says. The blood drips on the floor, but slower – until it stops.

  ‘Sit on the bed,’ Krissi orders. ‘I’m going to clean you up. And then I’m going to ask you what the absolute fuck you’re doing.’

  He gets his plant-mister, and a clean towel, and starts cleaning my arm, carefully, as I wince.

  ‘This is like that bit in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where Marion cleans Indie up, after the fight,’ I say, trying to make conversation.

  ‘Put your arm down now. And I’m not going to get off with you,’ Krissi says, still wiping, very gently. ‘You are not a hot archaeologist.’

  After a minute of cleaning, he suddenly stops.

  ‘Johanna, you’ve … what the fuck?’

  He looks at my arm.

  In my panic and blindness, I did not look at how I was cutting myself, and the incisions have landed so that it appears, surreally, to spell something out, on my arm.

  ‘NWA?’ he says, staring, incredulous. I look at the arm again. Yes. The cuts appear to form the letters ‘NWA’. I look like the world’s maddest Niggas With Attitude fan.

  ‘I had a self-harming accident!’ I say. ‘It’s not a statement – it’s a typo! Razors are very hard to spell with! I wasn’t really looking! The sub-editors will change it, later.’

  He continues looking at the arm.

  ‘You look mental.’

  ‘I am! I am mental!’ I say, starting to cry, very hard.

  Krissi wipes the last of the blood from my arm, and says, very gently, ‘Johanna. Would you like to tell me what the sheer cunt is going on?’

  And so I start to tell him everything – about Rich, and Kite, and the panic, and the review, and being horrible. Halfway through, I start crying because my arm hurts, and he goes over to his drawer again, and comes back with two pills – taking one himself.

  ‘It’s Dadda’s medicine. Just have one. They’re very strong. And you can’t have any more than one,’ he says, warningly. ‘You can get addicted to them.’

  I take one, and look at him. I think about how quiet he has become recently.

  ‘Are you addicted to them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, breezily. ‘I haven’t tried stopping yet.’

  As the pill kicks in, I curl up next to Krissi, on the bed, and he puts his arm around me, and strokes my hair. I carry on telling him about John Kite – but the whole thing doesn’t feel so bad now, because I’m safe in Krissi’s bed, and I could probably just stay here forever. Everything is very warm. I’m very tired.

  ‘We’ve always got the Bee Gees, Kriss,’ I say, sleepily. ‘We’ve always got Robin, Maurice and Barry.’

  ‘Johanna,’ he says, staring up at the ceiling. ‘Sometimes, I think it won’t be enough.’

  But I’ve already fallen asleep.

  In my dream, I’m back with John Kite, at Regent’s Park Zoo, in the late evening. I am remembering what happened. We’re close close close – we are the same thing, woozed together with gin. We’re like the voices of the Bee Gees. I’ve known him forever and there’s nothing I can’t say to him, and I know what I do want to say: it’s a speech I’ve made a thousand times, in my head.

  It’s written in my diary over two pages – I quote it by heart while I wait for trains, or walk in the rain, or need a mantra to get me through. And it is this:

  ‘Since I met you, I feel like I can see the operating system of the world – and it is unrequited love. That is why everyone’s doing everything. Every book, opera house, moon shot and manifesto is here because someone, somewhere, lit up silent when someone else came into the room, and then quietly burned when they didn’t notice them.

  ‘On the foundation of the billion kisses we never had, I built you this opera house, baby. I shot the president because I didn’t know what to say to you. I hoped you’d notice. I hoped you’d notice me. We turn our unsaid things into our life’s work.

  ‘Loving you is the dirty fuel that powered me, during my industrial era. You’ve got to have a hobby – and mine is you. Mine is being in love with you. It was never the sun coming up in the morning that lit up the room. It was me, quietly flaring, when you said, “One more?”’

  That’s the speech I’ve had in my heart for a year. That’s what I want to say to him. But I know I can’t. You can’t make book-speeches to someone’s face.

  So this is what I said, drunk, at Regent’s Park Zoo, instead. I explain that I am Chrissie Hynde, and that I have brass in pocket, and that I’m going to make him notice by ‘gonna using’ my 1) arms 2) legs 3) staah 4) stansta 5) fingers 6) mah mah mah magernation. Result = giffertoome.

  ‘We’ll be like Burton and Taylor,’ I conclude, brightly. ‘Amanda Burton, and Dennis Taylor.’

  I say this to John Kite, and he looks up at me, and opens his mouth, and the wolves howl, and the gibbons spool, and I wake up, in Krissi’s bed, with my face pressed into his chest. And that’s all I remember.

  Something’s wrong. Fugged with Dadda’s medicine, it takes me a while to work out what that is: it is agonising pain in my arm. It feels like it’s going to burst.

  ‘Krissi!’ I shout.

  He wakes up with a start.

  ‘I’m bursting!’

  Krissi puts the light on, and looks at my arm. It’s gigantic – swollen, purple and with the fingernails an alarmingly dark blue.

  ‘Jesus! The tourniquet! You’re only supposed to leave them on for twenty minutes!’ Krissi says – undoing the tie as I hold my arm out, like Frankenstein’s monster.

  ‘Fuck! Fuck!’ he says.

  ‘Am I going to lose my arm?’ I weep.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Johanna,’ Krissi says. ‘Open and close your hand. Get the blood moving again.’

  ‘I can’t! I can’t feel it!’

  Krissi puts his finger in the middle of my palm.

  ‘Squeeze this,’ he says.

  I pathetically curl the fingers a bit.

  ‘More than that,’ Krissi says, firmly.

  I try again – a little harder now. I can feel his finger on mine.

  ‘See,’ Krissi says, relieved. I squeeze his finger, hard.

  ‘I love you, Krissi,’ I say.

  ‘I love you too, you unbearable item,’ he says back, staring at my hand. Then he looks me in the eyes. ‘That’s actually true.’

  For the next few weeks, I cover the cuts on my arm with long-sleeved shirts – the scabs catching, slightly, on the fabric, when I move, to remind me of what I did.

  The scars feel like I have a message on my arm. Something that needs to be read, urgently, by someone. It was only years later that I realise the person I had written that message to – the person who wasn’t listening – was me. I was the one who should have been staring at that arm, and working out what the red hieroglyphics meant.

  Had I translated them, I would have realised those lines read: ‘Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don’t do things that make you want to hurt yourself. Whatever you do, every day, remember this – then steer away from here.’

  But I don’t have a thought as clear as that then. Instead, I attend to what I think is the most pressing lesson to be learned from all this: I borrow Krissi’s NWA albums, and learn the whole rap from ‘Fuck Tha Police’ – just in case someone should ever see the scar on my arm, and quiz me, on my devotion.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  So what do you do when you build yourself – only to realise you built yourself with the wrong things?

  You rip it up and start again. That is the work of your teena
ge years – to build up and tear down and build up again, over and over, endlessly, like speeded-up film of cities during boom times, and wars. To be fearless, and endless, in your reinventions – to keep twisting on nineteen, going bust and dealing in again, and again. Invent, invent, invent.

  They do not tell you this when you are fourteen, because the people who would tell you – your parents – are the very ones who built the thing you’re so dissatisfied with. They made you how they want you. They made you how they need you. They built you with all they know, and love – and so they can’t see what you’re not: all the gaps you feel leave you vulnerable. All the new possibilities only imagined by your generation, and non-existent to theirs. They have done their best, with the technology they had to hand, at the time – but now it’s up to you, small, brave future, to do your best, with what you have. As Rabindranath Tagore advised parents, ‘Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.’

  And so you go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall, and go, ‘Her. I’ll try and be her. I’ll try and be her – but here.’ You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them – you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, ‘More input! More input for Johnny 5!’ as you rifle through books, and watch films, and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things you are watching – Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Julie Burchill gunning people down; Grace Jones singing ‘Slave To The Rhythm’ – that you will need, when you get out there. What will be useful? What will be, eventually, you?

  And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager, slowly urging you towards the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.

  And some versions of you will end in dismal failure – many prototypes won’t even get out of the front door, as you suddenly realise that, no, you can’t style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude-problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success – hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water.

  But one day, you’ll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly: staying up all night to hone, and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked.

  Until – slowly, slowly – you make a viable version of you, one you can hum, every day. You’ll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you’re busy doing other things. What your nurture began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you’ll be entirely – as you’re too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass, without you even noticing.

  And later, over a glass of wine – because you drink wine, now, because you are grown – you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really, you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It is October, 1993 – two months since I fucked up so badly that I nearly exploded my arm.

  I’m at a Take That gig, at the NEC in Birmingham. I’m with ZZ Top. I know. I know! My social circle has changed quite a bit, in the last few months. I don’t go out with the D&ME crew any more – no more bitchy Kenny, at the back of the venue; no more of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of insanity: gin and sulphate.

  I’ve learned what my contemporaries will have learned in their first terms at college, or university – that the first friends you make in a new place are the ones you usually spend the next three terms trying to lose: and that it’s the people who are quietly holding back, and standing in the corner, that you will want to be with when your second year comes around. The quiet mammals, working in the shadow of the fabulous, fatal T-Rexes you are so flattered not to have been eaten by, when you first walked through the door.

  Zee is one of those quiet mammals. ‘We’re going to Take That,’ he said, on the phone, to me. ‘You need to see loads of girls, screaming, because that’s what you are. A big screaming girl from the Midlands. You’re an enthusiast, Dolly. Come and enthuse. Come and be a teenage girl again. Come and be a fan.’

  I think about him saying that, now, as I scream – like all the other girls – at Robbie Williams. His words are like Glinda’s kiss on my forehead. I’m an enthusiast, who’s been pretending to be a cynic. But I have been correctly labelled, now. I am for things – not against them. I must remember this. Mainly because this is more fun. It’s exhausting being cynical. You are trying to be an immovable, angry rock in the middle of a stream. But the stream will not move. It is you that will be worn down to dull silt.

  I scream, but the person standing next to me is screaming louder.

  ‘Krissi!’ I say.

  ‘I LOVE YOU, ROBBIE!’ Krissi screams. He’s wearing glitter across his face, like the girls standing next to him, and is vibrating with joy. ‘Johanna – which order would you do them in? Which order? Go on.’

  I look at the stage.

  ‘Robbie, Jason, Mark,’ I say. ‘Howard, the roadies, the roadies’ friends, a man in the street, Robbie again – but wearing a mask so he doesn’t realise, and say, “I’ve already done you.” Everyone else in the world. Then I’d sleep. Then sort my sock drawer out. Maybe put the tea on. Then Gary. How about you?’

  ‘ROBBIE!’ Krissi screams. ‘Robbie, until security pulled me off him. Then I’d wank at him, from behind a door. OH, ROBBIE!’

  I’m so touched Krissi’s entering into the spirit of things. He really is a good big brother.

  It’s going to be so easy to write this review. First of all, no one else at D&ME wanted to review Take That – ‘Darling, they’re just … wank-fodder for teenage girls,’ Kenny said, in horror, as I nodded my head, and replied: ‘Yes! And you can never have too much of that!’

  And, secondly – just like I did, in the beginning – I can go back to explaining … why I love a thing. Explaining why you love something is one of the most important jobs on Earth.

  The day after I nearly exploded my arm, I lay under my bed, with my arm still bandaged, and thought: ‘I have to die – again.’ And again, this thought makes me very cheerful.

  I sorted through the inventory of what I had become, so far, and divided it into two piles – like I do with the records I get sent. What to keep, and what to throw away.

  TO KEEP:

  The top hat

  Fags

  T. S. Eliot

  Dolly Wilde

  Writing. Obviously

  Eyeliner

  Booze

  Sturdy boots

  Larkin

  Listening to the Pixies and pretending to be Kim Deal

  Having sex with as many people as possible

  Staying up until dawn

  Adventure (see also: having sex with as many people as possible)

  London

  TO REJECT:

  Cynicism

  Shit sulphate

  Standing at the back

  Hanging out with people who make me feel uncomfortable

  Self-harm – the world will come at you with knives anyway. You do not need to beat them to it

  MD 20/20

  Going out with people without checking – with me – if I actually want to

  Any p
enises over eight inches long

  Taking sexual advice from strange men at parties

  Saying ‘No’. I will always say ‘Yes’. With God as my witness, I will never ‘go angry’ again

  After being reborn again under the bed, I have three interesting conversations. The first is with my mother.

  It felt like I hadn’t seen her for ages, and we sat in the garden – me with the twins on my lap – as she sat ten feet away, assiduously blowing her cigarette smoke away from the twins. David and Daniel. ‘Daniel – short for “denial”,’ as my mother said, when she returned with the birth certificates.

  ‘Anti-depressants are a great thing, Johanna,’ she says, now, watching David wriggle off my lap, to go play with the Snail Farm in the roasting tray.

  We’ve resurrected the Snail Farm – we did a Snail Race at the weekend that took nearly three hours. Lupin had to keep picking up Carol Decker from T’Pau and make her face the right way again – she kept crawling up the sides of the tin, and away from the others. She clearly wants to go solo.

  ‘If you ever accidentally have twins and feel like throwing yourself under a bus whilst screaming, I recommend them highly,’ she continues.

  ‘I’ll remember this,’ I say, solemnly. Putting Daniel down, to play with David, I go over and join my mother.

  ‘Twos?’ I say, holding my hand out for the fag.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m your mother. I’m responsible for you. I gave birth to you. I’m not going to give you something that kills you.’

  I take a fag out of her handbag and light it. She nods. Fair enough.

  ‘I’ve found a flat, in London,’ I say, finally, exhaling. ‘I can move in at the end of the month. I’m going to use my savings as a deposit.’

  I put my hand on her arm.

  ‘It is good to have savings as a deposit. Thank you.’

  My mother looks at the end of her cigarette.

  ‘You really want to?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m spending so much money on trains down to London that it’s actually cheaper, and I’m excited about living on my own, and having my own toilet.’

  ‘It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, you know.’