I watch her. I watch her. Tell my brother and sister to look out of the other car window. I think they are playing some game. I think that they think this is a game. They’re too young to understand. My mother is on a mission. She is looking for my father. She thinks he is having an affair. She confronts him in the parking lot. He says nothing. It is not as if he does not know where to look but I know that it is not true. Not papa. Not my father. She is screaming at him now. I don’t know whether people are looking now, looking at the two of them, at this scene being played out in front of their eyes or looking away. I destroy my childhood diary when we get at home. I am a child. I am wounded now for life. I don’t know what to do. So this is what I do. I tear page by page out. I scratch out paragraphs. You don’t understand how much I loved this book, this journal but I don’t understand yet how to express my feelings, my imagination. My father gave me this book. Every year he has given me a diary in January. ‘This is yours. This is your journal.’ And I smile up at him, and with this book in my hands I can write anything I want. Who do I believe? I am my father’s daughter. I look like him. I don’t look anything like her, my mother. I know she hates me. Perhaps they will separate. Perhaps they will get a divorce. They drive home in separate cars. I am numb, struck dumb. I say nothing. My mother is driving too fast. It is unlike her. Her dress is above her knees. Is this what love is? Human nature is human nature. ‘Daddy,’ I say later. ‘I don’t think she’s your soul mate. I don’t think you’re meant for each other.’ But he says nothing, he just winks.

Sexual intercourse, that transaction, lovemaking for me was always dirty. I wanted to remain a virgin forever, pure. I wanted to be a nun. I knew I had to be punished from an early age, make sacrifices, always wear black, and kneel when I had to pray but I was not Catholic. But my mother put that idea straight out of my head. She told me that there were no nuns anymore and then I wanted to be a priest but everybody knows how corrupt church leaders are. I knew that I felt damaged, bereft, and lonely even as a child so I found comfort in books. Even when I grew older and watched films where girls would remove their articles of clothing watched by an aroused older man I would feel nothing. Absolutely nothing. Maybe it came from childhood. The orgasm in both the male and the female disgusted me maybe it stemmed from the fact that I hated my mother who I thought had been so wrong, so incompatible with my father (whatever had they spoken about when he wooed her I certainly do not know. He was cultured and educated, he had a degree and she could type thirty-five words a minute and she had a diploma) but I loved my father and worshiped him. And for all my life I have wanted a perfect love and not a physical love. All my life I have wanted to be protected from all of life’s storms, other women, younger women, girls, I wanted to be given a sanctuary to write and as an adult I would watch the flickering images of pornography silently screaming with laughter inside. So this is what men and women would do to conceive children, their bright angels, and heirs to thrones of addiction, substance abuse and domestic violence. There would be little or no dialogue. I would get either insanely jealous of their stupid voices even though I knew every little thing from the props to the bed was fake. Why couldn’t I do that? What was so wrong with me? After all they were merely actors acting, doing what they were told to do, posed, directed, and projecting. I was bored with it all and wondered where my head was at. Of love and sex I knew absolutely nothing at all. It bored me but not the love story, not the loss, the reject or rejection, the lover male or female leaving. Little slut, little whore, those weren’t words that bored me, that bothered me. And as I grew up the girl in me died when my mother told me what happens in this house, what is said in this house stays in the house. I came of age very quickly. Abuse will do that to you. Abuse at the hands of your mother, aunts (her sisters, her sister-in-law) the Johannesburg people, bullies on the playground, arrogant male teachers, and your first boyfriend when you are away from home, ten years older than you. Did he force me to do things I did not want to do? It hurt. They say it always does the first time round. I wrote him letters but I was not in love with him. The image I had of my parents watching two naked girls swimming, kissing with tongue, feeling each other as they come out of the water, touching each other, touching each other up and down, caressing their arms, their bodies. They sunbathed nude. It was the first time I had seen breasts, the voluptuousness of a woman’s figure and full frontal nudity. And something inside of me, a little voice said that my future life as a daughter who loved both her mother and father and a future life as wife, lover and mother had not only been sabotaged but ultimately destroyed forever. I was just a child who should have been asleep in bed dreaming. Attempted suicide is done with both eyes shut. This is not my time. No tunnel of white light. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The confessional poets. Sylvia, Abigail the exhilarated crazies. Look at me. The South African horror story. A landscape made of bars at the window, psychiatrists, and psychologists.

The nervous breakdown, bipolar, mental illness, crazy, insane, lunacy is not written on the body unless you tattoo it on your arm with a razor blade or cutting. You can be the perfect child but can your mother perfectly love you in a flawed world, in her flawed world. She did not want me with my effortless merits, my stage plays and rehearsals, my stories, oh no, she especially did not want to read my stories. ‘Leave it next to my bed.’ She said. ‘I’ll read it before I fall asleep.’ And I did but she had more important work to do. Shower, dress, make breakfasts, and go to work. ‘Oh, I’ll read it later.’ She said whenever I confronted her about it. She was doing even much more important work then. Watching her soap opera with her stockinged feet up on the sofa chair, her heels next to it with her eyes half-closed, dreamy, Hitler but without the moustache and the wall of tyranny. ‘Kiss me.’ She demanded from my asthmatic brother wearing his cowboy hat pulling his wagon around the family room. And I made endless cups of tea. And as I made each cup my heart would fill with hope that she would say, ‘My clever girl. You’re growing up so fast.’ But of course she never did. We were scavengers. We ate what we could find in the kitchen and if daddy wasn’t pensive he would go out and buy us something to eat for supper. My father would cry a lot and I would put my arm around his shoulder, barely reach it though and ask him, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ but that just made him cry harder and it was even more difficult to make him stop. I was always near the top of my class but there were issues, damages. They were always fighting.
‘Good night mummy. Sleep tight. Sweet dreams. I love you.’ No answer in return and it bounces off walls. I am turning thirty-five bordering on thirty-six. It will be my birthday in two months. Valium nearby (always close), Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke next to my bed, Poems by Sylvia Plath Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate. Childlike in an adult world. The only world in which I belong is media, that and the local Olympic-sized swimming pool. Clogged in a caged childhood continued, sentences slaughtered by laughter, coughing, a closeted collection of books (textbooks, poetry and short story anthologies, a string of J.M. Coetzee’s books line a shelf, The Childhood of Jesus the latest), blackness, traffic fills the inside of me that was always the exchange. I can only fall asleep with a handful of sleeping pills. I take long naps in the afternoon and wake up in near-darkness. Pills. Pills. Pills. Pax. Epilizine. Eltroxin. Melatonin. Zopiclone. Ativan. I have no inclination to go to Paris. Rilke hated it there but on the other hand Hemingway seemed to have taken to it like water off a duck’s back. Anyway I suffer from vertigo. Mostly people go to Paris because it is romantic. Isn’t the Eiffel tower romantic? You won’t get me up there. I am a hypochondriac and become anxious as hell when I am introduced to novel people and places. It terrifies me. What a laugh? Did she clap? Was she clapping? Is she proud of the fact that I am a storyteller and a poet, not a politician, not a politician’s wife or anybody’s wife for that matter and not the playwright or documentary filmmaker I wanted to be in high school? When she took her seat in the theater was she proud, was she beaming from ear to ear like the Cheshire cat. Depression is boring. But I’m used to it now. Every six months I’m shipped off for a week or so to a hospital to recover from psychosis, hallucinations. What a trip for my ego? I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. My sister never comes to visit. She doesn’t live here in this country, in this hellhole anymore. She lives in Johannesburg. My glory days are over. I’m afraid they’ve gone kaput just like all the men in my life. The only thing that’s ever stayed put is my stream-of-consciousness writing, my journaing and my armchair traveling and the people that I love the most in the world dying on me when I least expect it and leaving me alone to now dance with the brave, swim with the fishes, eat slippery sardines on toast that taste like salt and light. The rooms are airy in the house. I have to remember to breathe in when I come home from the hospital. There’s not much they can do for me there but wait for the hallucinations, the psychosis to pass but the insomnia stays with me, winter’s bone to carry me home. I’m a claustrophobic in the occupational room. They leave me alone to make collages out of colorful magazines. What big eyes the pictures have if I look closely enough, long and hard enough. A hazard to myself, a danger to myself and to others. During the day everything feels cool to the touch, spacey and clairvoyant. I’m seeing things. I’m hearing things. Voices. Dead people. Spirits. Spirits need homes too. They need to be accommodated. Spaces, shapes, anything metallic, corners and angles. Please don’t bring me flowers to brighten up the space next to my bed. I’m dying but then again I’m not dying. I’m living. Such is life. I’m cold but then again these days I always feel the cold. Sylvia is coming through. She has been deeply unhappy and afraid for such a long time. Her time is running out. I feel just like humanity, everyone else even spirits need to talk things out you know.
Sylvia Plath said it best in her own words as I have written it down here word for guided word.

We live in a world where when you’re regarded as extraordinarily gifted you have to be extraordinarily brave too. So when people hurt us our first instinct is to feel as if we have incredibly screwed up, but you know what pain is just pain and we have plenty to gain from it. We have to face up to the gigantic and staggering proportions of brutality on this earth-plane some time. We have to tell ourselves boy, this is going to take some time to get used to. And maybe, just maybe the world is trying to sell our soul something, stir things up in our consciousness or tell us that our spirit needs an adjustment. No one was there. I waited and waited and waited. You know I thought someone would just turn up, show up out of the blue. Maybe Ted would have come with flowers. Maybe he would have said he was sorry. I would have said I was sorry. I was just a fragile wreck. Maybe I should blame it on my gender. Females tend to get emotional, fly off the handle you know, go kaput but that evening I just got so flustered and moody. I was filled with despair and a feeling of hopelessness. I wasn’t thinking straight and maybe if someone had been there, a friend, a terrific friend, and an angel I wouldn’t have taken my own life. I would have outlived Ted. I’m sorry. What a mess I’ve made? I saw you Assia. Ted’s little wife. His brilliant housekeeper. Stop touching my things. Stop moving them around. Ghost house. Who is the ghost? Sylvia. Sylvia Plath. Knock on my door. I cannot open it. My fingers are all thumbs. I guess that’s what happens when you become a ghost. You also cannot scream. You cannot screech. You cannot shriek because that would be very unladylike. You need a string of pearls, gloves and soft white stockings for that. I caught Assia wearing my pearls one day. I pouted the whole day in that house walking into walls, through them as if they didn’t exist, as if they weren’t there at all. Did Ted care? He was too busy making love to Assia. I could hear them. Their pillow talk, their radiant glow if glows could be heard, how sensual her excitement was to him. To all the women in the world who have survived the ups and the downs, the lows and the highs you are going to do bad things to children. You are going to forget them, to hug them, to feed them (the word nutritious won’t belong in your head or diary), that they even exist when they are standing with baffled looks on their faces in front of you and theatre tickets won’t make up for a lost childhood, a lost mother. You are going to forget say that you love them, you are going to forget to make that birthday cake and buy one instead that tastes like yesterday’s newspaper, you are going to buy fish and chips instead of slaving over the heat in the kitchen, over pots and pans, you’re going to make mistakes and live a life of regret and they will grow up and become adults who will resent you for it and perhaps stay bitter about it for the rest of their lives. You are going to want to be a sex machine and play the femme fatale for all the days of your life. And you will wonder who is this mummy, and that who is this mother-figure that they’ve meant you out to be. And home will never be the same again. Home will never be a safe place for your children. I can see the tunnel of light now and the dominions of angels standing guard. I can no longer stand guard over adult children. One depressive, one dead. Just my luck I suppose. Ted and I should never have rowed in the first place. I sent him straight into the waiting arms of Assia Wevill. Women are infinitely crueller than men. Men want women to be sex machines all the time and then when children enter the picture what happens then. Domesticity? The bliss of family life with chickens, a tiny place in the corner of the world to call your own? What terrible mistakes I’ve made. I should have stayed in America. America was my home. I was an American girl. I’m so far away now from everyone and everything that I’ve ever loved since I was a girl. Perhaps Otto will understand me now. Like father, like daughter. A daughter following in her father’s footsteps. Wake me up from this nightmare, from this terrible dream of my own doing. My perfect, perfect love W. I am Lady Macbeth. I am Lady Lazarus. Peel the bright stars off the dead scar of a sky.

Wake me up. Wake me up. Wake me up ever so gently. I feel so numb as if I can never feel anything ever again in the wide, open spaces of this world. It feels very nerve-wracking to me. I never wanted to go like this. It’s all been a terrible mistake you see. It’s just that I’ve been feeling so grim lately and it just came upon out of the blue but I have this plan. I’ll go to the beach. The beach is the perfect place to dismantle depression. I’ll go swimming in the warm ocean water. He’ll come back to me because he loves me. He can’t love her. No, he can’t. She’s terrible. She’ll be a terrible housekeeper, touching my things and not being able to keep her hands off them. I’d love to see her put an apron on and show off her cooking skills in the kitchen. She can’t even peel potatoes so how can she cook. Tell me that. How can she run the household? She knows nothing about children. Teach them German! That damned Nazi language. That damned Jewess. Warren was planning on coming. He was planning on coming to help me with the children. God, what have I done, what have I done. Forgive me. I’m counting on his silence. A cheat is a cheat is a cheat. I was honest and good. Wasn’t I honest and good or did I too play a role in his philandering? And the children? I had beautiful children. He got to love them, raise them, watch them play, watch them grow up and I didn’t. My shoes, my dress, was I even thinking of what I was wearing that evening. I remember I was wearing my white shoes, very ladylike and such and I stuck my head as far as I possibly could into the oven. I wanted to do it right you see. No turning back from there. If only I could turn the clock back and hold my fat, healthy babies again, be young again, be twenty-three and not have let him kiss me on the neck. And not let it have been a whirlwind romance. Where was the wooing, the seduction and I had hated Spain so much. He took me there on our honeymoon. He took Assia Wevill there too, his lover, my rival, the woman he left me and his young family for. And what did it matter in the end. He still won prizes, loads of them, had lady friends and young girls fawning over him, and he even got married again. Lucky strike. Handsome is as handsome does. He found love again. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. I’m dead aren’t I. I’m deader than dead. I’m a real nobody now. No good to anyone but they say lovely things about my poetry, about my Ariel, nothing about my sonnet that I won some prize money for, or my short stories or my second novel. I burned that. Now that was bliss. When he left me and the children alone while he was gallivanting around London with Assia I just found that I had so much time on my hands so I literally made bonfires in the yard and burned a life half-lived on truth, lies and deception. Letters, verses, correspondence, papers, anything that was important to the famous Ted Hughes. Famous in life, even more famous in death. This time I’m not coming back for real am I. I’m not going to be found alive three days later. The ghost house, that’s what his Assia called my house. They didn’t even move my body yet but I knew she was there. I could see her. She was always touching my things, moving my things around but I knew she was done for when she had the abortion. I knew then that he would never marry her. Perhaps I even knew this before he did. Oh, my words, my poetry, my Ariel and they have gained popularity over the years, they still have substance but then so again did my jealous streak, my nervous breakdown, my bipolar illness, my suicidal illness as it later turned out to be written about by female poets from a much younger generation. Say the words mental illness and you’re immediately sensationalised and stigmatised at the same time. Lucky, lucky me. Otto are you looking down at me? Are you waiting for me to cross over? Is it my time yet? Time to say my goodbyes to my beautiful Frieda? Oh I’ve been so unlucky in love. Goodbye cruel world but I say that only half in jest.

You want me to wear a ball and chain. You want me to come with you hook, line and sinker. Well, I am not anchored to this world in any shape, way or form anymore. Who will save me from myself? Ted and his line of, his succession of mistresses. I have the features of a mannequin now. No, lipstick won’t do. How do you prepare yourself for the hereafter? Will the horses of the apocalypse come for me? I’ve have a rough, rough time Otto. Sorry I didn’t come and see you but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I needed country air that evening and rest not gas. When depression is beating on your door, don’t let that ghost in you hear me. Put your feet up, or get into bed, close your eyes and rest. Tell me how do I look? How do I look for death? Simply gorgeous, right? Simply gorgeous mess. I have to fix my face. I just have to fix my hair. I’m a mess. I’m a mess. I’m a mess. A spaced-out mess. Oh, Warren I didn’t mean for this to happen. You know me. Once I get an idea into my head. I’m so pale. I’m starving. I haven’t had anything to eat the whole day. But when death comes knocking at your door. Your time is up when your time is up. What a mess! And if there was only someone to hold me, to hold onto that evening. Could nobody tell anything was the matter, anything was wrong? Where were all my friends, my terrific, terrific friends? My partners-in-crime were nowhere to be found. Was all that I was good for was a cocktail at a book launch? My Frieda is beautiful (always has been) and that precarious act she had to balance on as a child, as an adolescent is finally no more. I guess this is my way of saying goodbye. There was a dream. I found a dream in Ted’s eyes and then the dream was no more because Assia Wevill awakened the dream in him once more. Daddy are you there? Otto, it is me your daughter, Sylvia. I am finally coming home. It’s time isn’t it? Time for me to move on, to move up skywards, cross over. Have I done bad things? Yes. So many prying eyes want to read my journals, my letters home, is my poetry not enough for them? There are papers read, exhibitions, enough said. I’m tired now. My arms are dead weight. This is what you wanted Ted. You wanted to be free. I am giving you your freedom but it comes with a price. Silence. I can’t wake up, sit up straight, talk. I must have taken something. What’s wrong with me? God, what’s wrong with me? I must be dead.

Fingers-cold-numb. They are my bright-stars of all time. I didn’t just see them as singers but children-protected-by-their-loving-and-financially-secure-parents-and-sane. The brother-and-sister that I wanted justice for, her cry for help who sang love songs to death and made a stimulating and pretty noise inside of my head. I-can’t-smile-just-observe-myself-under-pressure. Even-Cinderella-contemplated-suicide-once-upon-a-time.

I thought that what they did was art. Genius. I just wanted Karen to eat. Now that everyone knows what anorexia nervosa is and how this eating disorder is tragic, self-loathing is tragic, self-pity is tragic and how it wastes away the body, the reproductive system especially. And in the last days of her life I wonder if she could even bring herself to make herself breakfast and eat it or was it just swallowing a handful of laxatives and diuretics that got her through the day, a coriander leaf. Where the hell was her four leaf clover? Anorexics, I don’t worship them as I do writers now anymore. I worship poets more. I miss her. I miss Karen Carpenter and the dresses she used to wear when she used to perform. I wonder what her voice would sound like now, her albums, what she would look like if she performed or toured in Japan. If she would have had that station wagon and those children. Why on earth wouldn’t anyone want to wear a kimono around the house? Anorexia move over. Something else has taken your place, triumphed.

It’s called suicidal illness. So if you’re special, gifted in some way, exceptionally intelligent, brilliant at falling, not falling in love, not being the marrying kind, being the divorced or flying solo or having flings or being promiscuous kind then perhaps this advice is for you. You can either take it or leave it. Behave yourself and eat all your vegetables on the plate because in the end women are designed for revolution more than men. You’ll be rewarded with a cool glass of pineapple juice or orange squash. Gulp it down. Soon it will taste like you’re getting lasagne meat on your bones that for the longest time have felt like you’re having an infidelity, like vitamins, the aftertaste in your mouth of the clinic and still you won’t put weight on. You will ask for yoghurt and ice cream. You will tell the nurse oh today you feel like a salad, a tomato sandwich, wilted lettuce and nothing else and she will just look at you with her death-ray stare until you want to punch her in the face. You will pinch your skin even though you are skinny-thin, on ‘death-row’ but what they don’t understand or do understand is that mummy never said she loved you.

You simply weren’t loved enough, good enough and your parents will tell this handsome psychiatrist who is married and has a daughter and a son that you are a superstar why do they need to tell you of all people in the world that they love you and instead of your mother taking your hand or stroking your face as if you were a child again you’re thinking I need a Band-Aid and your mother will tell you to stop sulking. ‘Karen you would look so pretty if you would just eat. I have some recipes. I made a list. I brought a tapestry along with me.’ And I will think to myself to do you love me, do you see me? I need to get back into the studio. I need to make another hit record. Maybe you were disobedient and had to be punished for something you did as a child that you can’t even remember. You did not obey someone or follow the rules. You can’t even remember the last time you ate a pizza crust. And the cute psychiatrist will ask you why are you doing this to yourself? Are you sick (is this lingo for crazy)? He assures you that he is here to help you but you can’t help but look into his dreamy-eyes and believe him. Perhaps therapy. But you mother coolly interjects and says this family does not talk about their feelings.

The whole world loves you. You have fans in Japan and maybe even in Jericho. Maybe they groove to your hip beat in Tel Aviv. You want to tell him these things but then again you think maybe he will prescribe you something. Sleeping pills. No, not such a good idea. She feels fatigue. Do you think about death, about dying? The cutie (the psychiatrist) asked. Is chocolate a food group, a protein, where does it fit on the hierarchy of the food chain is what Karen wanted to ask. Why do people go around saying all the time, ‘Death by chocolate?’ or things like, ‘Can we be buddies?’ ‘Why do I feel so deprived if I’m supposed to be the denim-wearing all-American-girl? The brunette with barrettes in her hair. Am I too rich, too out of touch with reality like all the great ones, the great artists? What I really feel is that I’m a failure, that I’m doomed. I seem to have this complex. Life is complicated enough as it is I know so why am I not fascinated and fascinated all at the same time with sadness and other people’s lives, their cruelty, their survival, my guilt trip, my survival-kit. I don’t understand that doctor, and the doctor that she wanted to impress would tell her that all anorexics suffer from a type of perfectionistic streak and that all she had to do was love the people who loved her and they would love her back.’

You see doctor I want my mother to acknowledge me for who I am and not the persona, the pose, the pout, the singer who sings love songs but I don’t think that she does. In fact I know that she doesn’t. Anorexia taught me a lot about death. You will not survive if you do not eat. Doesn’t a boiled potato with its brains mashed out like confetti taste like an exotic fruit after you haven’t eaten it in months? And turkey tastes like chicken anyway at thanksgiving. ‘You’re special Karen. We’ve always known that. I mean she’s always had this extraordinary voice and she and her brother have always been so close.’ This is her father. He is smiling warmly at her but it is merely an image, a figment of her imagination and instead of her feeling closer to him it feels as if he is killing her. She can feel that spark, but her claws are out, she feels as if she cannot function anymore or be productive. She is sick, ill. She has an affliction of some sort that we are capable of dealing with ourselves and not involving outsiders. We love one another. We don’t put each other down, laugh at our flaws, at our own expense. We are who we are.

And here I will say like Hemingway, Salinger, David Foster Wallace, Rilke, Jeanette Winterson and Shakespeare. It’s impossible to be perfect all the time is something that mother Carpenter would be likely to say. We are not like other families. We are not dysfunctional. What does that word even mean? I remember her as being livelier. Was more or less what her mother seemed to be saying or what do you want me to bring me the next time we come into town? I think her mother wanted her to say bring me a deep crust pizza, hotdogs, Chinese noodles, cheese, something to embroider while watching reruns in the tiny television room but all Karen wanted her mother to say was, ‘I love you.’ As if they were taking vows to spend the rest of their lives together with only eyes for each other. For Karen eating became something close to earth-shattering. She wrestled with the food on the plate with her fork until she thought perhaps she did need medication instead of the tender loving care of a smother who folded the kimono away that was bought for her in Tokyo by mostly Karen, who thought it would be a loving gesture towards a loving mother who put it in a cupboard in the box that it had come in and forget about it.

Eating became harder and harder for Karen and she never was as passionate about it as she had been as a ‘chubby teenager’ as one music magazine had put it years and years ago.
‘I’m fine Richard. I am ready to work. I want another number one record so badly like you wouldn’t believe it. The music scene changes all the time. We have to keep up with the trends, with what’s current. We’re still the champions of the world. Let’s open up a bottle of champagne and celebrate my homecoming. ’ She told her brother. They all pretended she was alright. Karen Carpenter, sweet girl, superstar that she was pretended everything was alright. Everybody put on a brave front. ‘Yes, yes, everything is going to be alright.’ Their father said as they sat down to eat like pilgrims around the thanksgiving table. ‘The Carpenters all together again. One big happy family.’

Well Karen I’m going to be a beast now. I’m going to be honest with you because I feel somebody who loves you and is close to you needs to be. You look like a wreck. Why don’t you take care of yourself, look after yourself first? This is not a good look for the Carpenters, for the team. How can you feel so detached? I want you back.

The real you. The way you dress now doesn’t impress me. SALAD-IS-NOT-FOOD NEITHER-IS-EATING- PLAIN-YOGHURT. You are going to die if you do not eat this turkey breast. Have some sauce too. You think being thin and becoming skinny-thin is the same thing but it’s not. You were beautiful then but now you have turned into a monster but her brother knew if he had said this to her he would have made his mother crazy-mad and his sister would have cried, wept for a man who would have held the door open for her after bringing her home after a night of bowling. But he never did. When you waste away it’s intimidating at first to the atoms and the particles that you are made up of. You think you can go back to the way you were. And you often think to yourself how am I going to fix this now? Skinny is the new terrific-looking. I felt as if for the first time in my life I was being fiercely admired, intensely adored, if I staggered or stammered I staggered and stammered grandly. I didn’t need prayer. I needed to be worshiped. There was the old Karen, the singer with the stunning voice, the drummer, part of an award-wining trio, the first Carpenter who got signed to a record label, the Romantic-singing-poet and the new Karen who was a skinny-thin version of herself.

So the greats. First up. A tapestry of Hemingway. Where-every-thread-seems-harmonic. I want to put my hands in his pockets and wonder what I will find there. In the inner lining of the fabric of his garments. Will I find the disease of alcoholism there or scribbled-notes (bits-and-pieces) of his phenomenal writing? Then there’s Salinger. What rapture? Wretched rapture that rips me apart at the seams. The man, his mind, his imagination, his characters dialogue (I wanted more of his genius, of Holden). I want to body-surf in it, swim-with-the-fishes, and show them my shark teeth and how I can put it to good use. He had far too much imagination in him. I think he stalked love or he was much more in love than with being in love. David Foster Wallace forever masked in a hellish cloth experiment. I will miss him. Karen Green will miss him infinitely more. His-life-was-brief-but-beautiful and he was good-at-sketching-the-oblivious-of-the-oblivion. Rilke hated the feast of Hemingway’s-Paris in every way.

But out of all them William Shakespeare beats them down. He’s my cocaine, my marmalade, my cheese on toast, French toast, tuna fish sandwich, and poppadum. I think he was the most vigilant when it came to dying young for love, for human violence. On-the-surface he was conservative (when it came to pornography, adultery, family, children). He did not watch his children grow up and play with kittens, stroke the ears of puppies. I think he lived alone when he wrote. He was a terrific-everything and a real nobody all at the same time. Cranking out all those sonnets, play after play, poetry. He never ceased to amaze. But I wonder about his scar tissue. His wounds enthral me. I find them sexy like words like mitochondria. Hemlock. Poison. Gourmet chef. Lobster. Gift. Christmas presents under the tree. Scout. Talented-with-tools. Brilliant-with-instruments. The-mark-of-a-man. An overwhelming nurturing woman. Opinion. Probability. Rope. Catholic. Winterson was a carpenter too making drawers (with-secret-compartments) out of words. They’ve all made lovely carpenters. Children too have skills, stages and spotlights.

Light bulbs and holy ground, plant them in fertile soil where the bulb will grow and the filament will with so much gratitude flash light and a halo will appear.

My youth is finished and along with it my bright star, and tears. I stopped thinking of the future.

You know I don’t know when exactly that happened all I know is one morning I woke up and I decided you are not loved, you are not loved. You will never be loved and the universe was laughing at me. There was no navigational system set on course for a husband, there was no solid path to follow to a career, no beautiful journey with challenges and an obstacle course to raise children only images of things, imaginary things like hallucinations, psychotropic medication that soon became not so imaginary and the usual Disney-fare, unicorns, talking mice and fairies and the Cheshire cat of which I speak so often in my short stories and a damned waterfall, David Livingstone’s waterfall, no trajectory, only adrenaline pumping through my veins. Whenever taste and sickness becomes fascinating your physical body begins to smile. Your fake mirror reflection smiles back at you, obsessed with the ethereal being you’ve become. Madness is my addiction. Missing it is my crush, my babysitter, my thin if I had an eating disorder or two. I think it’s sexy. Every day I’m seduced by it. Madness is my truth, my statement, the commentary I am making about the society that I live in today, my mother who is thin, who scolds me because I am not even though I tell her it is because of the psychotropic medication I am taking that makes me stay sane, put together, keeps me grounded but it seems to me she wants me to be high even though I am now healthy. I am fixed and the chemicals in my brain have formed their own social cohesion in their closet. Dopamine has her own shoes. Serotonin has a drawer full of pharmaceutical pamphlets. They’ve learned to be roommates, get along, and give each other motherly or hell sisterly advice. All I know is that they’ve got it into their brains sometimes to talk about me and my weight.

I don’t go anywhere about the weight theory. I don’t entertain it. There’s too many conspiracies about that out there. For a long time I thought thin was good, easy, effortless but now I just think it is just a sick mentality. Women come in all shapes and sizes. They’re good mothers, lovers, career women, filmmakers, photographers and take pleasure in everything that they do but they do not experience highs and lows. They do not crumble under pressure. My sister is a photographer. I just thought I’d put that in there. Skinny-sister, kohl-rimmed, peacock-eyes who spends her weekends in galleries or at dinner parties. A life, a life, a life. One must amuse one self.

There might be a leap of faith, but you can never forget about the madness but how can I forget about drowning, falling half-asleep in warm bathwater after I have taken my sleeping pills. I want someone to tell me that they have done those kinds of things too.

I am falling, falling, falling and oh it is so intoxicating and who is to blame for that. Even in therapy I do not talk about my promiscuity. My other-life in another life. There’s a shift that I cannot fix. The men protected me, said I had integrity but the women had eyes like slits, bits in the workplace and they all reminded me of my mother. They stripped me of everything. How daunting it was to be nineteen. To be twenty and sinking into madness, into despair, only finding hope in books and not to have found love yet, yet always the absence of it. Of course my expectations of finding love never grew. I had known what to expect from an early age. I grew up with it. My father worshiped me and I worshiped him (it was pure, it didn’t come with drama even though perhaps in the end it was only an illusion) and I would find that out all through my life you’d get dropped fast if you did not give in to the physical love. I had convinced myself as a young child that my parents were not made for each other. Instead they were all wrong for each other and they were not soul mates fated to be together in sickness and in health till death do us part. Young, old, young-at-heart, divorced with children, single flying solo so how could I ever forget not being the daughter who was adored, who was adorable, who brought home impressive merits one after the other, success after success, the scholarship girl, the Maths genius who went to space camp and worked in New York to pay her university tuition. I have forgot how to shine unfortunately (at thirty-four can a girl still shine, no, she should be having babies, her wedding dress wrapped away delicately in tissue paper). I have forgotten how to illuminate, to blur reality, to blur the normal until it feels like snow, winter settling, filling, being driven, channelled, wedged into the sides of a lake, feeling your way into this world as the interloper, always the Outsider, the loner and not feeling that that is the weirdest part of all. I don’t dream anymore and people who have died, crossed over they visit me in my dreams and ask me after staring at me (poor brilliant girl are you still sick, what happened to all your fierce intelligence and potential when you were fourteen years old in high school) for the longest time, ‘Do you remember me?’ and I say in return. ‘Yes, yes, of course I do. You were my English teacher who died of pancreatic cancer before your time or you were diabetic, alcoholic, pill popping aunt who died before your time. You were my favourite teacher. You were my favourite aunt, my second mother and now you’ve gone dead on me.’ I wish you both were still here. Unfortunately I am still sick but nobody really seems to understand what is wrong with me when my sister seems to have the perfect life. Hatred, I will never let her go. I will never surrender her, clever girl.

What does it matter if I am a stupid girl or a clever girl? Mourning is destructive. Morning is sabotage set loose. Dreamlike, slow, metaphysical braiding the soul with the spirit, a broken self-portrait.

And what do you remember about our childhood I ask my soul and it replies nonchalantly. I want to, need to, desire to remember nothing.

The abnormal, what does that mean? Why, why do we use our heart as a weapon? My mother’s tears come to me in angelic dreams. Is this all that she had hoped for me? Misery and failure. The wolves at the door.

I am bleeding. Space. Exile. History. Nerves. Fatigue. I give it room to breathe. It is the only thing that makes me feel as if I am a woman now. Mothers and daughters must talk about these kind of things, bond over them but we never did. Insanity isn’t it?

What my mother taught me about female poets is that their words were like bows, arrows, apples wasting, falling in heaps and that a child’s eyes can see everything. Vanessa Woolf, my veil, and my apprentice. I will caution you as Achilles was cautioned. As I’m sure Virginia an incest survivor and victim of sexual violence will tell you.

I am growing old. I am growing older. Who will be my mummy then, make me tea, and see that I get out of bed, open my curtains. I believe that she thinks I have always been a threat to her. She is killing me. Her knives are sharp.

The great thing about childhood and two sisters (hating you hating me) sharing a mother, a father and a brother are that there are outgoing scars, there are wounds, that the material that they are made up of is luminous but that there is also a haunting sensation of death and there you will find an honesty open and truthful, perhaps dazed and adventures that will always lay scattered before me, before us as a family. Salvage it as a stamp, an axed scrap or splinter, an album that you page through with trembling fingers looking at dark wonder after dark wonder and one day you know it will be destroyed. Observe the comic. There is both comedy and tragedy in it. Observe the bird, its agony and often its own attempted-suicide as it falls from the nest. Sacrifice is totally unsexy.

I began to fly, see things in a different light once I reached out to books. Marvellous, wonderful things that made up for my childhood and my mother forgetting me, for her to see that I was simply non-existent in her eyes. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in my eyes became the beet king and queen to me perched on their earth-thrones. She was both a mother and an older sister to me. Don’t talk to me about dysfunctional families. Every family is dysfunctional in their own way. Don’t talk to me about cruelty to animals. All human beings are animals. They‘re barbaric. Tears are simply water. Believe me they can be wiped away. They shouldn’t define who you are, or your pain.

By this time it is winter. I hate love. Always have. Ever since I was a child. Don’t touch me. I would think. Don’t kiss me to say hello. Abuse can do that to you. Estrange you from people, your immediate family, and the common people. The only thing I love is madness. It’s Hollywood to me it really is. A bright light city. You have to be so careful letting people in to see the real you, trusting people and even as you are reading this I am hating you too. Look it just comes with the territory, the district. I cannot trust anyone. Mummy you really hurt me. Remember that. I need to know what humanity up close and personal really means. I was never taught what it was. Human rights were always hip during apartheid, post-apartheid, the African Renaissance, for our Rainbow children (I’d rather grieve than say Rainbow Nation). But what on earth were they? I knew as a child mine were always denied or was I simply living in a state of denial.

I could not have wished for better rejection letters. ‘You write with such energy, variety but we cannot publish this.’ Oh that one I remember with wit, it had tasted like spit before it had tasted like honey, milk, butter cookies but also bitterness and hurt. I took it quite personally. Reject. I felt that that word was illegal. Simply put. My mother constantly reminded me it was just a label. It was just as storm in a teacup. My sister smiled as if it had made her happy, joyful but already I had suffered an early death. I knew what the words suffering and sorrow meant. I also thought the rejection of my poetry and haiku was political. My guess the proverb of a skeleton.

‘I enjoyed reading this but unfortunately it will not be placed first.’ They liked it. They liked it. I was overcome, overwhelmed, felt jubilant. But still nothing was good enough. I learned to hate women by hating my emotional, my elegant, and my beautiful mother and I became another version of her but of course I was not vigilant of this in youth. Adolescence, how I miss it. Living in borrowed ignorance. I really am an orphan.

This soft, erotic woman with the strength of a man in her arms, and in her tennis legs, her beautiful white teeth biting into the soft yellow sunny-side up of a fried egg while I watched her and shrieked at her where was my own breakfast while she would just smile, her Mona Lisa smile. She was my Trojan horse, my little shop of horrors, my cancer years, my addiction for all of my life and so her pain became my illustrious pain, her struggles became my own, her burning winter became my project and soon I was the anonymous ghost-child who was a flower in the attic turned into a thief. My sensual-flawed-mother, exotic-smother over her only son.

My sister was happy. She thought she made the right life choices. Perfect doll-child. Perfect adult wearing the perfect shoes, undergarments made of lace, the daughter who is not part of me, the winter guest (I say this in all of my short stories to remain anonymous but there I am a rag doll like M. Night Shyamalan in all of his films) There I am in my little cute box, wooden, not flesh, not blood, not made of skin only violently curious (thinking I am a branch. I am a tree. I am a leaf. I am a stem. I obey. I am Whitman’s grass. I am the weather girl. We’re anticipating clouds today.) She wants no part of me, no portion because perhaps there is meat-to-my-bones.

I seldom worship God. I seldom wonder why that is.