A woman called Amanda puts me and Dadda in ‘the Green Room’, which isn’t green, and I drink four cups of squash, and feel an anxiety that feels like all the other anxieties I have ever had, but played at double-speed. Everything feels utterly unreal. I feel like I’m about to swoon.
‘Everything feels utterly unreal. I feel I might be about to swoon,’ I tell Amanda, as she finally ushers me on to the studio floor – leaving Dadda behind, in the Green Room, doing ‘thumbs up’ as I leave.
‘Oh, don’t swoon!’ Amanda says. ‘The feature after you is a cockatiel who’s learned how to skateboard, and we’ll have to pad him out for six minutes if you swoon. He attacked a researcher earlier.’
The show is going out live. I am put into position, for the presenter to walk over to, when it’s time for my bit. As the cameras circle around me, I look down, and see myself – through the cameras – on the monitors, grouped around on the floor.
And I really wish I hadn’t.
At home, we have no mirrors in the house – not one. Mum won’t have them: ‘They’ll just break, and bring bad luck.’
So for the last fourteen years, I’ve always had to just … guess what I look like. In order to see myself, I draw myself, over and over, in my drawing pads – with huge eyes, and long hair, and beautiful dresses trimmed with fur, and pearls. There’s a chance I could look like this, after all – and surely it’s more useful to draw yourself like this than not?
Of course, I’ve often seen my reflection, dimly, in dark shop windows, up town – but these windows did not know me; they had only seen me for a second, walking – so how could they know what I looked like? How could glass reflect so quickly? The glass, in its haste, was wrong.
But here, in the monitors, in the studios, I can see myself, full-length, in colour, for the first time in my life.
And although it should have happened somewhere else – and over something far more dramatic, and noble – as I look at myself on the monitor, I feel my heart break.
Because my biggest secret of all – the one I would rather die than tell, the one I wouldn’t even put in my diary – is that I really, truly, in my heart, want to be beautiful. I want to be beautiful so much – because it will keep me safe, and keep me lucky, and it’s too exhausting not to be.
And standing here, looking at myself, in cold horror, in the monitor, I can see what a million people are going to immediately notice: that I am not. I am not beautiful at all.
I am a very pale, round-faced girl with a monobrow, and eyes that are too small, and lank hair the colour of dead mice, and I am not beautiful at all. And I am fat – a solid, pale fatness that makes me look like a cheap, white fridge-freezer that someone’s wheeled onto the stage, and then painted a worried-looking child’s face on it, due to a terrible unkindness.
I look at me in the monitor, and I can see me very quickly looking down at the poem in my hands, and reading it very intently – because I don’t care what I look like. I am a poet, and a writer, and I deal with hearts and souls and words, and not meat and vanity and a dress that would have made me look better. It doesn’t matter that I am ugly.
I will just have to work out how, exactly, that is true. I will prove that it doesn’t matter that I am ugly, later on.
And as Midlands Weekend’s presenter, Alan ‘Wilko’ Wilson, walks towards me – cameras foreshadowing his move across the studio floor, like courtiers bowing, as they reverse – and I start to vaporise with nerves, I suddenly remember a very, very important thing about Midlands Weekend. The key thing about Midlands Weekend, in fact: Everyone in the Midlands hates this show. They only watch it to slag everything on it off.
Appearing on Midlands Weekend is like offering yourself up as a sacrifice to every bored, casually-spiteful channel-flicker in the Midlands. They’re going to kill me.
And at that point, my brain kind of explodes.
‘FRIENDSHIP’, BY JOHANNA MORRIGAN.
Who is my best friend? My bosom-buddy, my pal?
My best friend is my beast friend
My dog – who looks like Limahl.
Not for me a human
Who might give away secrets and hopes
Who betrays your loneliest whisper
Or crushes your heart, and then gloats.
But, oh! The wolf of Wolverhampton
We run in a pack of two
You’ve seen me through the RUFF! And smooth
And I know I’m gonna stick with you.
You cannot hug me with your paws – I know, I know, I’ve tried,
But Bianca, I know that you can always hug me – hug me with your eyes.
‘Johanna Morrigan there – from the Vinery estate in Wolver-hampton!’ Alan says, walking into my shot. ‘Now, Johanna, I have to ask you a question.’
‘It would be inappropriate for us to go on a date, Alan,’ I reply.
I didn’t know I was going to say this to Alan until I did – my brain is white with fear; it’s a completely automatic response. The joke made me say it, as Krissi and I used to say.
To my surprise, Alan becomes immensely flustered. Years later, he got investigated by Yewtree, and was found to have a collection of teenage girls’ knickers, so, retrospectively, I can see why he was alarmed.
‘Hahaha! Johanna! I see you have a zany sense of humour,’ Alan says, recovering, and looking at the camera. ‘So you love your dog, yes?’
‘Yes, Alan.’
‘You’ve always loved your dog?’
‘Yes, Alan.’
‘Johanna, we had an old friend of the show on last week – Judith Trevalyn, from Redditch council. And she was suggesting that the so-called “Devil Dogs” – Rottweilers, Dobermanns, pit bulls and German shepherds – should all be put down. How would you react to your “wolf” being put down?’
‘Like I put in the poem, Bianca’s my best friend,’ I say earnestly. ‘Having Bianca put down would be like killing my best friend.’
‘And how would it make you feel?’
I consider this. ‘I’d go mad!’
I don’t want the idea of me ‘going mad’ to sound too heavy, so I pull a comedy ‘mad’ face. Eyes crossed, grimacing. Whirly-whirly finger to the forehead.
This doesn’t seem enough – Alan pauses, as if waiting for me to say something more. I obliged.
‘We’re like Shaggy, and Scooby Doo,’ I continue. ‘Best friends forever.’
To clarify this point, I do what, as I know now, you should never do if you’re a freaky fat teenage girl on a live TV show, in the grips of your first ever wave of utter, existential self-loathing, and being watched, ultra-critically, by everyone in your home town.
Without explaining why, I break into a very impassioned impression of Scooby Doo.
‘Ri ruv my rog!’ I say again. ‘Revveryrody ruvs my rog!’
I take a breath. I can feel what I’m going to do next.
‘Scooby Dooby Dooooooooooo!’ I conclude, howling. I am giving this impression everything.
‘Scoooby Doooby Doooooooooo!’
On the car-ride home with Dad, he stays almost completely silent. It takes an hour from Pebble Mill to the Vinery, and he says nothing until we’re nearly home – turning off the Penn Road, and onto the estate.
‘Johanna,’ he says.
He looks across at me. I have cried and cried and cried and cried until my sinuses are solid. I am burning up. I want to burn up.
To this end, I have zipped my anorak right up, to generate heat. I want to leave nothing in this passenger seat but a pile of ash and what looks like a charred leg of pork, such as I have seen in the photos of spontaneous human combustion in Beyond Explanation? by Jenny Randle (Robert Hale, 1985).
I have had to put the poem on the dashboard, to dry out – I’ve cried so much onto it.
‘Johanna,’ he says, as if preparing to give me a piece of information he should have given me long ago – perhaps at birth – but fatally forgot, until now. He sounds like he’s kind of blaming himself
for everything tonight, and is going to prevent it ever, ever happening again.
‘Johanna – our name’s “Morrigan”. Not “Prat”.’
I must remember. I am a Morrigan. Not a prat.
For the next few weeks, things are quite difficult. As we are in the phonebook, a small yet dedicated band of people from school take it upon themselves to ring the house and scream ‘Scoooby Doooby Doooooo!’, then slam the phone down again.
I deal with this with all the coping mechanisms I know: lying under the bed with the dog reading Little Women, and eating jam sandwiches dipped in instant hot chocolate.
I thought it had all blown over when, two Tuesdays later, Dad came into the house, looking furious. Someone had drawn a Scooby on our back gate, in black gloss paint, and written ‘Mystery Machine’ on the side of the van.
‘People drawing fucking … American retard dogs on the house, Johanna,’ he said, warningly, as if I were on my last chance. ‘Fucking branding my vehicle.’
The only person we know who can re-spray the van is Johnny Jones, who fortuitously nicked a spraying kit from Wickes when he was working there – but he’s up in Leicester at the moment, visiting his ex-wife.
So for the next two weeks, we drive around in the ‘Mystery Machine’, and my dad has to park it up close to walls, and hedges, to hide the writing, and this makes him very irritable.
Not least when – pale with hangover – he gets out of the van outside the butcher’s, and the butcher greets him with, ‘Rikes – a ghost!’
And of course, I can’t go out onto the estate at all now. After wearily sitting and guarding the front door, the delivery of the last post is no longer a relief to me. Before I set fire to myself, uselessly, on Midlands Weekend, I would whistle for the dog and go straight down the library, and spend the afternoon there, with all my authors, hanging.
But now, neither I, nor the rest of the kids, can leave the house in daylight. There’s a bunch of youths who keep shouting ‘Oi – Shaggy! It’s Shaggy!’ at Lupin. With my NHS glasses, meanwhile, I am ‘Fat Velma’. I couldn’t have chosen a worse cartoon to reference. I’m a borderline fucking genius at handing ammunition to the enemy.
And so, as summer heats up, we are all trapped inside, on top of each other. Everyone is treating me like I’m a massive dick. This is totally fair enough.
The only good thing that happens in this entire, awful stretch is the prize cheque for the £250 arriving.
We cheer the envelope. I open it – still shamed but, at least, wealthy. I am full of astonishing plans for this money. This, at least, has made the pain worth it.
Then, the week after, the clutch goes on the van, and my father appears in the door of my room.
‘Gonna need that dosh, kidder,’ he says.
He spends £190 on getting the car done, and the rest goes on the overdraft (£30) and the Red Lion (£30).
So now, broke again, still lying under the bed, I stare up at the underside springs, three inches above me.
Downstairs, the phone rings. My mother answers it.
‘Yes, yes – very funny. Is that Barbara Lemon’s kid? Sod off.’
Another Scooby call.
I feel like Scout Finch, when Atticus is being victimised by the whole town – except, instead of trying to save a wrongly prosecuted black man from the electric chair, I wrote a poem that sounded like I’m a lonely leper virgin that wants to have sex with my dog, and then did an impression of a major Hanna-Barbera cartoon character on live TV instead.
Not only have I not earned a fortune which will keep my family safe, but I have now also made us even more of a freakish laughing-stock on the estate than we ever were before. Which – given that the huge Buddha in our window means that our house is regularly referred to as ‘Big Daddy’s House’ – is saying something.
‘I am a drop of poison in the well/That can’t be taken out again,’ I think to myself, sadly. I love quoting my own poetry. ‘I am the spore that flew over the citadel wall. And I was the fattest person they’ve ever had on Midlands Weekend.’
I lie there for a minute, until the truth dawns upon me – like a torch shone down a badger-hole, accompanied by the sound of spades, clanging.
There are no two ways about it: I am going to have to die.
FIVE
I am thrilled by the idea of killing myself. It seems like such a gratifyingly noble thing to do. A monster has come to town – me – and there is only one hero who can kill it: me.
I’m not actually going to kill myself, of course. For starters, I suspect I might put up a struggle, and fight dirty – perhaps biting – and, secondly, I don’t actually want to die. I don’t want there to be a dead body on the bed, and it to be the end of everything. I don’t want to not live.
I just … want not to be me any more. Everything I am now is not working.
I basically want to live in the ‘easy like Sunday morning’ bank advert – a huge, warehouse flat in London, in which I am wearing a fluffy towelling robe, and reading the paper.
And then, later, I will be going out in a beautiful green dress, and saying something so funny, someone has to have sex with me. That’s what I want. That’s my future life.
Lying under the bed, I consider the chances of this scenario happening to the current Johanna Morrigan. They are blindingly small. I just don’t have the resources.
‘I’m gonna need a bigger boat,’ I think.
And so, I just … start all over again. I have read, many times, the phrase ‘A self-made man’, but misunderstood what it meant. I presumed it was describing, not a working-class boy made good in industry – smoking a cigar, in slightly over-shined shoes – but something more elemental, and fabulous, instead. Someone mage-like, who had stitched themselves together out of silver gauze, and ambition, and magic.
‘A self-made man’ – not of woman born, but alchemised, through sheer force of will, by the man himself. This is what I want to be. I want to be a self-made woman. I want to conjure myself, out of every sparkling, fast-moving thing I can see. I want to be the creator of me. I’m gonna begat myself.
The first thing I’m burning is my name. ‘Johanna Morrigan’ does not have good associations any more. ‘Johanna Morrigan’ is the answer to the local question, ‘Who do you think has fucked up recently?’
I compile a list of possible new names, and take it in to Krissi.
He is on his bed knitting himself a bobble hat whilst listening to an Agatha Christie audiotape, from the library. A big, pale boy hunched over a tiny pair of needles. Krissi becomes very angry when you tell him that knitting is for girls.
‘Knitting was primarily a male hobby at its inception,’ he says – big pale hands clacking the needles. ‘You’d anger a lot of Scottish fishermen if you told them it was a girl’s habit. They’d beat you with a giant salted cod, Johanna. And I’d pay to watch.’
I turn the audiotape off, just as Poirot has a tisane.
‘Poirot isn’t going to find it difficult to work out who killed you,’ Krissi says – pretending to stab me through the heart with the knitting needle, and turning the tape back on again.
I turn it back off again.
‘Krissi, I’m getting a new name. What do you think would be good?’
‘“Hamburglar”. Now fuck off.’
‘Seriously, K.’
Krissi knows how low I am. Two days ago, he found me lying face-down, and crying onto a sanitary towel, which I had positioned under my eyes, by way of acknowledging the sheer volumes of sorrow. He did laugh at this, but also looked sympathetic.
‘I still think “Hamburglar”,’ he says – but knits quieter, like he’s listening.
I’ve tried to choose a name that’s thin, and light and powerful, like an aluminium glider: I am going to climb onto this name, wait for a thermal, and then fly it all the way down to London, to my future.
It’s got to work in print – it must suit black ink – but it also needs to sound cheerful when shouted across a bar. It mu
st sound like a joyful yell.
The list of names I make are evidence alone of why, on the whole, it is best for girls not to become mothers in their teens. For whilst teenage girls are more than capable of raising a child perfectly well, the kind of name a teenage girl is apt to choose is poor.
‘How about “Juno Jones”?’ I ask.
Briskly: ‘They’ll call you “Jumbo Bones”.’
‘“Eleanor Vulpine”?’
A look.
‘“Kitten Lithium”?’
‘Is this actually for a human being? You’re not getting Iggy Pop to name the new Blue Peter cat, or something?’
‘Yes – it’s for me. How about “Laurel Canyon”? It’s where, like, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young lived in the Sixties. The hippy Valhalla. I could be Laurel Canyon.’
‘I hate Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I think they’re cunts.’
I blink. Blimey. Krissi smiles.
‘Not really!’
But his eyes are cold.
‘My favourite two are “Belle Jar” and “Dolly Wilde”. Belle Jar like in The Bell Jar, you know – Sylvia Plath – and Dolly Wilde, who was Oscar Wilde’s niece. She was, like, this amazing alcoholic lesbian who was dead scandalous, and died really young.’
Krissi looks at me.
‘And these are the names you’ve chosen to lead to a happier, better life?’
‘Krissi seriously – which one do you like best?’
‘You can’t be just “Johanna Morrigan”?’ he asks.
‘I can’t be just Johanna Morrigan,’ I say. ‘I can’t.’
Krissi sighs.
‘Ip dip do/The dog’s got the flu/The cat’s got the chicken pox/So out goes you.’
An hour and a half later, I’m in the big chemist’s in Queen’s Square, shop-lifting black Rimmel eyeliner into my coat pocket, with an immense sense of destiny. I feel happy, for the first time since I left Violet’s house.
It’s morally okay to steal this eyeliner, because I need it. I need it, to draw Dolly Wilde’s face onto my own.
SIX
I love Dolly Wilde. She’s my new pet. She’s an early nineties prototype Tamagotchi. I am my own imaginary friend. In many ways, it’s the best and healthiest hobby I could have discovered right now: me. I am going to take my run-down shell, and upgrade myself.