By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
23) Housework
It's not that she feels tied to the house. Nor imprisoned. Within a prison's solid walls and unbreakable routines many a lifer feels secure. Rather it is that any house, any flat, makes Julie aware of her insecurity. She feels any house to be made of paper. Doors so thin they can be punched through, windows can be smashed, cars driven into and demolish walls. Slugs can slide under doors. Mice can nibble through boards. Wasps, bees, moths and spiders can come creeping in from outdoors. Dirt comes treading in with every child. Noxious odours ooze in through every crack and cranny.... All that any indoors does is to increase her awareness of her human vulnerability.
So, this Friday morning, Julie quickly does the housework, a rapid going on from task to task, hoovering the hall and stairs, straightening the beds, washing the dishes.... Being busy to get out, and to stop worrying over the man Paul hit, what it might mean, not wanting to be left alone looking at the furniture again.... The blue cloth in her hand wipes over the stainless steel draining board, and.... damn it's only just eleven o'clock. What to do with the rest of the morning?
Julie knows that for some the brittle shell of a house offers the illusion of control. Within they can order their own life, arrange their ornaments and rugs, keep the thin crust of a wall between the ordered inside and the confusing outside.
But, beyond the brick box, Out There, the shabby reality waits always to encroach. Two days neglect will have soft dust settling over the furniture's hard edges, marring the distinctions of tone, texture and colour. Without the hoover's daily whisking the carpet pile will subside. All has to look like the photos in the magazines. Set off by a potted plant. Inside.
In the world outside this house, this place to live, this postal address, has to be for. Paid for by her conjunction with some man. Let it be Paul.
For somebody somewhere life has to be easy. She can't believe it. Rich or poor they've still got to fill the hours, to be someplace. And it's not class, has nothing to do with being tenants or homeowners. Even on Sydenham people are buying their own homes. They paint them a different colour. They're still here.
There are no neat divisions now. No strata in society now. Compartments now. Home compartments. Car compartments. Job compartments. Each of us in our own little cell of a life, cell of a family, cell of a house, cell of a car, cell of a job. A cellular existence. And in this cellular society we have to belong to a group of at least two. Julie's lucky: she has three. It'd be four; but they will keep taking Paul away.
The rich put locks and chains and bars on their brick boxes. Distrustful people advertising their untrustworthiness. Paul's grandfather says — clever bastard — "Instead of moving the furniture about, these days the bored housewife moves house instead." He's as closed in.
Comfortable, and closed in. Inactivity, and ennui. Many lives can be lived inside one house. Inside one mind. Inside one room. Shut away from the indifferent world with each our own small despairs. Shut inside a thin little house, shut inside a thin little skin, terrified that someone, something, is going to break in, make contact. Frightened of being shut in the house forever, and frightened of its shell becoming transparent and frail and of the outside coming crashing in.
We're all closed in. All closed in with no norms to rebel against, only types to avoid. Avoid being with them, avoid being like them, avoid being them. Fragmented people in a fractious society. Watch them slip from guise to guise, type to type. Well-behaved people in a schizoid society.
Here women take their identity from their function — mother, wife, manageress, typist, tart. An identity clothing them from the tasks they set themselves. Housewives with handfuls of bubbles leaving trails like snails on whatever — child's head or doorhandle — they touch. But being the functions they set themselves, and feeling safe within those functions, when the tasks are removed, through divorce or bereavement, or the children leave home, the women are left without an identity. Only a house.
If Julie wanted to be anyone else it would not be the good-time girls in their short skirts and perms, nor the knitted country lass letting her labradors out the back of the car. Julie would like to be those women with full trolleys in the supermarket. Slim tall women with clean hair, pink skin and new clothes.
She switches on the radio. A DJ is excitedly sneering at an item of news, making nonsense of it. All over Bridgwater lonely people like her are plugged into their radios. It's the companionable noise they want, an occasional tune to trickle into their isolation, to break their own mouth-stuffed silence with a few familiar words that isn't talking to themself. They don't want the DJ's swank. Not the DJ's fault. The DJs cater to the extremists and the cranks who make the calls and write the complaining letters. The DJs think that's the listening public. The real public couldn't give a shit who the DJ is or what he says, they're just waiting for the next piece of music.
Irritated with his talking Julie switches him off.
The anger at his silly excited voice stays within her. The anger is a separate thing. It is anger at Paul for getting into this new scrape. She knows it's not his doing, so the anger is at herself for being angry at him. Angry at the children too for not being concerned. She knows they don't know enough of what happened to be concerned. So she is angry at herself for being angry at them. Angry at her mother for making the most of the drama. Even that is without justification. She forgives her.
Julie has got in the habit of forgiving her mother. Julie has learnt how fallible as a mother she herself is. Michael's neuroses undermine her self-confidence. And she regards Alice with dread. There is no place in Julie's life for self-congratulation. Such is her own lack of parental self-confidence that she disbelieves any parents who believe themselves satisfactory. Their mistakes are waiting to be born in their child. Alice is waiting to be of breeding age. No-one to blame. Just life. And Julie herself too is innocent. It's the bloody world and life that's all wrong. The anger's there still, but sometimes it's not enough to just shout at some DJ on the make or at the TV's banalities.
So what else does she do? Write to her MP? The thought has her laughing aloud in her clean kitchen.
Why, tell me Mr Politician, does living have to be so hard? Why, just to get a house and a few little comforts, do you put so many obstacles in the way? In a place like this it's the only way to make life tolerable. Why make it so hard?
Why?! Why do I bother even thinking of you, she mindshouts. You don't give a shit about us. Economic integers, that's what we are to you. Not even our own numbers. You don't give a single shit. You're more concerned with winning votes than causes. And d'you know what you do — by your transparent courting of votes — you lose respect. And votes. I ask you, Mr Politician, what kind of people politicians are when they made of idealism a dirty word. You made the word mean impractical. But where, Mr Politician, would we be without ideals? The rule of law, joke, is an ideal. Brotherly love, joke, is an ideal. See, Mr Politician, where we are without ideals. We're here, bloody here. And d'you know why you, Mr Politician, have got no respect for the law? Because it's you who makes the bloody laws.
You jailed a girl for seven days for stealing a single bottle of milk. Why? The world is all wrong, all wrong, Mr Politician. And don't tell me you've got the answers. No system of government works. All systems contain the seeds of their own corruption. You know it. But we kid ourselves, Mr Politician, that you and your colleagues are intelligent people, wise in your devious ways. If without honour. Solely because you are our government. Then we once again discover that you're neither honourable nor intelligent. And that's depressing, because it adds to our impotency. You're just performers. Tricksters. Barking dogs.
I'm not going to rely on you, Mr Politician. Nor on any of your systems. Certainly not on any of your systems. Because once any mind relies on a system then it stops thinking for itself. Then they're yours. Right, Mr Politician? Even if they're not yours, you still win. Right? You're taking Paul from me and I love him.
She realises that anew, with a deep anxious thump of the heart: I love him.
What did that man want last night? She has no understanding of the self-centred worlds of childless people. What do I do, Mr Politician? Do I read my stars like all the rest? Horoscopes to give us hope? Pretend that in the future something might happen?
Julie doesn't cry out for help because she knows there is no-one she knows can help her. She knows too that the police aren't coming for Paul. They would have been here by now. She decides to go and do the week's shopping on her own. Her mother'll collect Alice. Paul's got the money. Has he?
Feet thudding on the carpet she rushes up the stairs. His last night's trousers she put in the wash. They were empty. The money will be beside the radio clock, if he hasn't put it in his jeans.
She lifts the clock. The money isn't there.
The washing machine whines as it spins. The clothes can now be hung out. In a minute.
Forcing herself to move slowly, she descends the stairs.
commentary.... Julie's anger, this Friday in July, was self-evidently deeper than at the one aggressive drunk. Hers was an anger at the hand life has dealt her. Life itself, though, that organic pulse and net, could not be held to blame. So, instead, she directed her anger at the way values had been arranged by others around her tiny existence. Those others she saw as politicians — of many colours — and her way of existence she saw as inescapable.
When we are young our thinking is dominated by our wondering what we are going to become, by the reading of signs and portents into our every indecisive venture. When we're older, and by trial and error we have come to know who we are — sexually, spiritually, socially and intellectually.... Knowing all that doesn't help, because we're still in a stage of becoming, but now of becoming only older and we know that we are about to lose all that knowledge. We have changed, in that we have grown and that we have known life, but we're little the wiser. We are still, like Julie, lost.
All Julie wanted was freedom. Freedom of choice — the choice of lives. Freedom to move — to move to another life. She did not want to be a damp housewife tainted by kitchen smells. She did not want to be a coarsened factory hand. Nor did she want her life all neatly parcelled up one minute, and the next all undone.
Life happens in bits and pieces. Security is just a matter of kidding yourself you can hold it all together. Julie knew different, and life's chanciness appalled her. There she could be walking about the streets one minute, the next she'd be undressed in bed, or in hospital, or half undressed or bombed or blasted apart by a car accident. That was her future, a future of grabbing life by its edges and pulling it back together again.
Poverty is a dearth of expectations. Julie wanted a political system, a social set of values that would have given her real freedom. The poor and the helpless cannot be reliant upon the doubtful altruism of rich individuals.
"A country is its people. And on how a government treats its every citizen shall it be judged." So said Paul's grandfather, and that someone she distrusted and disliked should be so right angered her again. The truth, she felt, should belong to the wholly virtuous, not to those who have made mistakes, like Paul's grandfather with Paul's mother.
The freedom Julie desired was based on justice, and she knew that there was an absence of justice, both social and legal, in her life. The punishment for any crime was according to who you were and not what you had done. If you were a Minehead bank manager or a Nether Stowey retired major, then you were let off with a warning, whether it was for importuning fellatio off 12 year old boys with a knife in your hand or for shooting your neighbour's cat with an unlicensed gun. But let you be unemployed and young and living in Bridgwater, then you would be a menace to society, made an example of, and locked up. That was Julie's perception of what passed for justice.
This kind of anger lies simmering below a life, ready to erupt in mindless violence or vandalism, which will only make matters worse in that it will diminish the perpetrator's self-respect and add to the anger. For Julie this anger manifested itself in tightened lips, which had become already an habitual grimace and which put others off, and so shut off yet more avenues of escape, of freedom.
Those tightened lips deterred the children. She saw their life like her own and became angry for them, and angry at their innocent impotence. Angry too at their innocence making irrelevant the dramas of her life. Michael's preoccupation was with the money for his school trip and, though annoyed by his apparent selfishness, Julie knew that such concerns were natural to the state of childhood.
So what did Julie actually desire of life? Although Julie disliked solitude and privacy, neither was she one of those sociable animals capable of time and again chuckling at the same jokes made by the same people. She certainly did not desire the respect of others. Julie knew how in a million little ways she daily hoodwinked the world. If she had earned the world's respect it could only mean that she had, for the moment, successfully fooled them all.
Self-respect was consequently impossible: her standards were too high and her aspirations too various.
All religions, all creeds, were the inventions of other people and were inapplicable to her life. Happiness of itself was always too brief a state. So what was left? Sex? That she should be the plaything of her glands? She aspired to more. Yet what was there? The answer had to be humanity itself.
But humanity also was too many. Julie's concerns were for Paul, Michael and Alice. But, like her, Michael already held life on a very tight rein, had to control it lest it bolt away with him. And she loved Alice for her liveliness, but knew that it was that which would lead her into trouble. And she loved Paul for his lack of malice; but knew that if he wasn't so easygoing she might have ridden out of the trap of her life on his pillion. So the safe thing she loved him for — his acceptance of life — added to the trap of her life and made her angry.
Julie didn't know what Paul — sat somewhere on his bike with the fight having happened — must now be thinking, feeling.... and the estrangement of the new added to her sadness and her anger.
True Stories
In August 1985 Co-operative Retail Services evicted squatters from their 8 room Down House in Eastover, Bridgwater. Among the ten people made homeless were Tony Pryk and Andy Hill.
In 1985, while her husband was in prison, Mrs Patricia Margaret Dunn, mother of two, removed the coin box from her meter and, using the same 50p, she stole 32,900 cubic feet of gas.
In December 1989 Lloyd Jonathan Phipps, of Chilton Street, Bridgwater, and Robert William Rawlings, of RAF St Athen, Barry, South Glamorgan, were in St Mary Street when two men asked them the way to the Admiral Blake fish bar. The two strangers were met with abuse. They walked away. 19 year old Lloyd Jonathan Phipps and 19 year old Robert William Rawlings ran after them and attacked them. During the fight one of the men fell through the Kwik Fit showroom window. He needed seven stitches to a shoulder wound.
In January 1990 Somerset County Council released figures which showed that pesticide levels in the 220 million gallon Durleigh reservoir, Bridgwater, were in excess of Common Market limits. Wessex Water spokesman, Mike Peacey, said, "There's no risk at all to anybody drinking the water."
Wessex Water have earmarked £350,000 for clean-up projects, such as a carbon filter being fitted at Durleigh reservoir.
