 Used
to Be
Elizabeth Baines
3rd Place Prizewinner
I’m holding my seat with both hands here, we’re hurtling
along the motorway, nose to tail, towards the set of a
student film we’ve both agreed to be in, Sally’s giving
me a lift and no way is she driving with concentration,
she’s laughing her head off, she’s telling me a story,
how she spent a year in Lanzarotte. What a life, she
says, My God, life-a-Reilly, fantastic cheap food,
drinks in the bar all day long, I only came back because
I got fat, you wouldn’t think it, would you, I used to
be fat? No you wouldn’t, just look at her, stomach flat
as a teenage anorexic’s, on show in her hipster
micro-mini, schoolgirl hair down her back, you’d never
know she was forty, though that’s what she’s playing in
the film because nowadays all the heroes and goodies
must look as though they never had a past.
Well also, she says, laughing, we’d outstayed our visas,
though but actually we outstayed them ages before, but
the cops, see, they were our mates, once a week they
rounded us up and stuck us in the cell for an hour and
then came for a drink! And she gives a loud crack:
whenever she laughs she throws her head back – eyes off
the road – and when she talks she always shouts; and now
she flings her skinny bare arm out, she’s driving
one-handed, and in the hand she’s flailing she’s holding
a nut bar, she’s eating too.
She slides me a look – my grip tightens – her wide mouth
pursed now over a grin, maybe she thinks I’m shocked by
the visa-dodging story, or maybe that’s just the way her
mouth happens to close on her teeth: I didn’t know then
– it wasn’t exactly my priority – and I don’t know now,
now I’m writing it down.
I used to be a writer who decided for her characters
what they were thinking. But something happened, call it
age or call it time or call it all the stuff that’s
happening now in the world. I used to write in measured
sentences but now mostly I haven’t the patience, not now
the world is running away with us, I used to hide behind
the third person, but I’m admitting it now, that was me,
this is me, clinging onto my seat while she guns us
along and yatters: maybe she’s just oblivious, she’s
onto another story now. She’ll miss the exit, she’s
done it both times before, however soon beforehand I
warn her, and while she’s off in the world of her story
the car in front zooms closer and the dial on the clock
nudges ninety, and my life as well as the road begins
rushing by.
You wouldn’t believe it, she is saying, This morning,
broad daylight, we had the front door to our flats
kicked in, we heard this banging and then this
splintering! And I’m seeing the crackhead, which she
says he was, which he must be, the way things are now,
kicking the door in the brilliant summer morning, her
boyfriend running down through the shadowed corridors to
accost him, and yet my past life is flashing, a memory
gleaming brightly of bright-green marsh all around me, I
was six, I had gone to pick a flower, a bright-red
flower; somehow, oblivious, I’d found my way without
sinking, and then suddenly I was trapped by water and
lethal green moss on all sides…
But the images of her story are also unfolding: the
little rundown front garden, the gate which doesn’t fit
banging on the gatepost as the boyfriend ejects the
crackhead, and all the leaves on the trees in that
street glittering in the morning sun. And there in
bright sunshine too are the motorway barriers whipping
beside us, and in my head also the image of the film set
we’re driving towards: a small suburban semi, a white
plastic door with stained-glass roses; and, since we
might not make it the way things are going, the image of
us arriving if we do; and the story of the film, a young
woman violently attacked, and the characters we’re
playing – me a loud-mouthed factory-worker neighbour,
and she the girl’s calm and sensible mother – which
we’ll have to believe in and make real, and with a bit
of luck will. And up above, a plane, small and bright in
the late afternoon sky, going down towards the airport
but seeming suspended because of the speed we’re doing,
and therefore unreal, an uncertain symbol now that what
has happened has happened, bright-coloured, I’d say it
looked like a toy, but I no longer trust metaphors, now
it’s so hard to know what things mean. And all the
while, out of sequence, the images from my own life are
flicking.
I used to believe in plots, but they’re too insistent
and simple; there’s no such thing as a single setting or
a stable scenario, they’re always an author’s lie.
It’s terrible, shouts Sally, it’s awful round our way
now, it’s getting dead rough – and pictures come to me
of the time I once happened to live there: the elder
tree in my garden which I took as a metaphor for the
life I had then, single-parent and lefty: a tree from
old wives’ tales, ie the tales of independent women,
with magical or medicinal properties, with flat creamy
blossoms which I said to myself at the time were like
sacrament plates. I was hopeful, I was tough and brave.
And the image of the spiderplant sweeping down from my
mantelpiece with all its optimistic vegetative
spiderplant babies; and then the image of it smashed: I
threw it at my married lover, I wasn’t tough, I wasn’t
brave, I wept and despaired.
And flashing past with the bridges are all my selves,
the single mother, the hippy student, the middle-class
housewife giving dinners, the teacher’s–pet swot, the
efficient no-nonsense young professional. And the
victim: the young woman put down by her macho male boss,
the child the boys threw stones at, flicked
school-dinner custard to land in her hair. And then a
memory popping up to surprise and shame me: the day I
lay in wait with my sister for two girls from the slums
and taunted them all the way to school and pulled their
hair. The bully.
You should see it at night now, yells Sally, her voice
scandalized but also filled with relish, and a sign
comes up, we’re halfway there, at least we’ve made it
halfway there, to the tiny hall beyond the plastic door,
and the two student director-producers in their jeans,
and the intent cameraman with his cowboy gait who has a
problem, in that cramped kitchen, with camera angles.
And I take my eyes off the road and look out at the
fields, a flat plain reclaimed from the sea, and my
recurring nightmare comes to me, the dream of flooding
I’ve had since a child, the sea surging inland or
slipping round insidiously, slyly, and very soon the
deadly silver stretching to the horizon all round. I
used to think it was insecurity, but maybe it was a
premonition, the way the world is going. Or maybe it was
telling me that, in spite of what narrative so often
tells us, nothing, including our personalities, is
stable, but fluid.
Sally rubs her nose: takes the hand still holding the
nut bar and puts the heel of it on her nose and
vigorously wiggles, and I tense, she has to be obscuring
her view. She takes it away again – I relax just a
little – she says, garrulous, Excuse me, I’m not being
rude, I have to do that, I have trouble breathing – I
tense again – My nose got broken, I was badly beaten up
last year. My jaw as well, she says, I had to have it
set, I don’t want to talk about any of it, though. And
she’s already onto something else and laughing. Maybe
she was lying, maybe it’s just the tyranny of stories,
the way they take you over with their own internal logic
and their pull towards drama, you say one thing and the
story turns it into something else.
Yet the scene comes to me vividly: the dark suburb she
says is dangerous now, the muggers huddled in hoodies
and Sally approaching with vulnerably naked legs and
arms… but my own life’s still unspooling, and I’m
hearing a sound from a day when my marriage was failing,
I took the pushchair to the park, it was a winter
afternoon and going dark already, and the sound was the
sound of ducks landing on the pond, a sound of slicing,
or tearing, I heard it then as a symbol for what was
happening to my marriage, a central symbol in a story of
ending, mine. Which would only be one story because then
I got happy, but I have to say I can’t hear ducks
landing on water without that particular story surfacing
and its sadness sweeping me again.
Sally’s scrabbling in the pocket – she’s finished her
nut bar – someone hoots, we must have swerved; she pulls
out a pair of sunspecs, white with a little strawberry
to echo the big one on her tiny T-shirt, she says, I
love sunpsecs, I’ve got eight pairs, all different
colours! It’s like bras and pants, she tells me, I have
to match them, which is why I wear a different bra every
day. And she laughs. She’s put the specs on now, they’re
like a child’s specs, she looks about ten. I’m in danger
of constructing a character now: I’m not privy to how
she’s feeling but I can’t help thinking she’s just not a
serious person.
We miss the exit. And this time we miss the next one,
the last one off before the bridge across the river
south, there’s no choice but to cross it and then turn
around. On the bridge there are road works: we hit the
build-up and she leans on the brakes. Now we’re
crawling.
My life has stopped flying by me, the past sinks back;
the bright bollards, the glittering cars, the high-up
bridge girders, take on a vivid, pressing presence. I
have room to think of being irritated – I told her once
again to get ready for the exit, once again she didn’t
– there’s a potential drama between us now, me being
annoyed and maybe trying not to show it, but I don’t
know if I am, I no longer even know if I’m a person who
gets annoyed about such a thing, and I wouldn’t like to
say how she’d feel if I did. We’re practically standing
and the queue stretches ahead right across the half-mile
bridge. We have to call to say we’ll be late for
filming.
Of course she tells me many stories, laughing, as we
crawl to the other side, about Lanzarotte, about the
band she sings in, about where she shops for clothes and
what this outrageous shop assistant said. Trying to turn
back we get lost on a ring-road freeway; we take a turn
towards the south and I fail for several miles to
persuade her to turn back again. We inch back across the
bridge. This is the turning, I tell her, but she misses
it, and we have to take another, a long way round. We
get lost in the town. This is it, I say, this is the way
we went the both times before. No, it’s not, she says,
and drives on and round and round.
At last we’re there. She laughs in delight as she pulls
up. She breezes before me through the plastic door with
roses, and they’re all waiting, the other actors, the
directors and the film crew: My god, we got lost! She’s
regaling them, entertaining them, with our adventure,
our story, what a hoot, and what a menace those road
signs, really confusing, and those roadworks, shouldn’t
be allowed in rush hour: all scandalized relish and
laughter.
*
It’s night filming we’re doing. It’s dark now. Here we
are, dressed for the characters we’re playing, me in my
factory overall, she in a housewife’s apron. We’ve been
waiting for hours while they set up the shoot for this
scene, this construct, in which we find the girl, the
daughter of the character Sally is playing, who’s been
violently attacked.
The clock has eased into the early hours. We’re
exhausted, so tired we don’t need makeup after all to
make us look our haggard parts.
She’s petulant suddenly, stroppy: she says, If this was
an Equity job we could demand time and a half.
She says, drama-queen peevish, This scene is really
difficult.
Then, as if she realizes she’s overstepped it: I think
it’s really important, this film, I think it’s wonderful
they’re making it – and now she sounds pious and even
precious.
I suddenly see that her nose and eyes are red with
unshed tears.
She sees that I’ve seen. She says, OK, I’ll tell you.
Tell me what?
Who it was beat me up last year.
She says, My last boyfriend, the guy I went to
Lanzarotte with.
But then she rallied and dried her eyes, and the
studious-looking young actor playing the hoodie came in,
transformed in his costume, and she gave a loud cracking
laugh.
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