The artist has said he uses his paints to search for his subject, layers the colours up, and then slaps them back as if it’s some BDSM game of peekaboo. He works his pieces until they surprise him. This time, though, I’m surprised because it’s my face hanging there on the gallery wall. Toby Raine has painted me in thick gestural strokes. Rough and expressive. It’s a tremendous honour, and I should be delighted.
I am delighted.
Only, there is that old habit of avoiding—no diverting the attention away from myself that kicks in. It’s the residue of what I call an unfortunate upbringing. The act of remaining invisible is something I honed so very well as a child. Although I’ve spent forty years trying to unpick the core of that social anxiety, here it is again.
The painting is all flesh from the waist up. The body aims away but for the tilt of a shoulder. She glances back—as if to weigh my worth with that oil-painted eye. She consists of valleys and peaks in thick layers. Her face swiped away as if hit by a backhand blow. There is shape without high definition except where it matters—the daub of emerald for the eye, the smear of blue for an earring, or the slight purple flare of the dress at the bottom right corner like a gas flame that flickers against the skin of her exposed back.
That purple dress. The thin silk that revealed so much, the cutaway shoulder, the chill on my back, the sore throat I developed that night from wearing it with the cold air-conditioners aimed at the catwalk. My throat dried up, so I couldn’t speak when it was my turn to present a case of wine for the auction. I croaked through it and heard the groan from the wine donor in the audience. He was disappointed. I was frustrated about putting myself out there, in public view, only to get sick and feel like a fool at the end of it. The night was not the pretty event the original photo depicts. Although I came away with the title of Mrs New Zealand Elegance 1986, in my mind, I fulfilled one of my mother’s doom-drenched prophecies, of which there were many.
This one warned against ‘getting too big for my boots’ because I was destined to fail from the get-go as far as she was concerned. This was the core motivator that caused me to focus on the negatives of the beauty pageant instead of the positives.
‘Just who do you think you are, Missy?’ My mother’s long-dead voice still asks.
It’s a good question, and one I am asking myself now, without the judgemental tone.
Lately, I have moved from writing about what I don’t know to what I do. Writing about other people’s lives has been a safe place so far. Now, I dare to open some of my own lived experience to see what can be made of it. There is this essay and the novel I recently published called Crazy Love—the tip of the iceberg floats closer.
Writing a personal essay is not without considerable dread of falling into sentimentality. But the truth is that the past is never buried. ‘It’s just put away under the bed for a while.’ Lee Maracle said that when we spent time together at the Vancouver Writers Festival in 2019. ‘Not lost. Never lost.’ Although Lee was referring to what we term ‘lost culture’, I think her words also work regarding a person’s general historical experiences.
Sometimes, details from my past rise from their depths and find their way into conversations as if to remind me that they still exist. They blurt out uncontrollably before I have the chance to reel them back in. Little hints of that dreaded past that redden my cheeks.
* * *
Junot Diaz writes, ‘as any Freudian will tell you, trauma is stronger than any mask; it can’t be buried, and it can’t be killed. It’s the revenant that won’t stop, the ghost that’s always coming for you.’
I do like a good haunting in my literature. But, like Diaz, I don’t welcome it in my private life. Those verbal unravelling moments of aspects of the past that rush forth like tiny confessions I’d rather do without.
‘You are the shit.’
Junot signed this in my copy of The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao when I told him I liked his freedom to swear on stage. Thank you, I said and took my book, knowing it was a compliment and aware of the double entendre.
Mrs New Zealand Elegance 1986. And then my name. Toby named me. There is no hiding from that. I was twenty-one. A young mother and wife. My husband encouraged me to give modelling a go. But having to smile for a camera did not suit me. I felt stiff and self-conscious. The catwalk has a layer of anonymity high above the audience. Follow the neat line down one side, then stop, pose, turn, walk, and point the feet so they land one directly in front of the other and use the hips like a lure. I loved the prance of it. The music was working like a heartbeat, propelling me forward. That part of modelling I did enjoy. As it turned out, I wasn’t tall enough for a serious career on the catwalk.
* * *
I have stripped my life back in places since that unfortunate upbringing. Cut out chunks of unwanted memory, hoping they would stay that way. For years, I refused to talk to my mother until she lay unconscious, dying in a hospital. I was never strong enough to fend off her manipulation. I could never find the right things to say to stick up for myself on the spot. Later—yes, always later, I could think of the clever retorts, but never in her presence. So, I hid from her. Refused her calls like a bad daughter.
Most writers I hear speaking about their childhood talk about books and writers they fell in love with. Parents reading to them at bedtime and visits to libraries. I did not grow up with that kind of encouragement. There were no books in our house. I did not grow up reading or losing myself in the magical world of fiction. I wish I had known the wonders of words back then, but it was all too distant for me to comprehend.
I was one of those children who arrived at school without shoes or food. I don’t remember much food as a child, only its absence or the ugly stuff like half a pig’s head in a pot with soggy cabbage, tasteless flour and water dumplings.
Eat the eyes; they’re good for you. I never would.
There were very few photographs of me as a child. Four, maybe five that I remember. One school photo made its way home and remains unpaid. I sit at the end of the front row on the concrete of the school play area, looking as though I belong to a class two years younger. My lack of growth concerned doctors. We visited many, swapping to a new one whenever the bill came in.
One day, one of these doctors was furious that our mother had dropped us at his office and fled to avoid the overdue account. He vented his frustration on the four children lined up in front of his desk. Small as I was, I took my nearest brother’s hand and marched out of that surgery to walk all the way home without being tended to.
A couple of times, I was sent to a health camp to receive appropriate care — my height, they assumed, was stunted due to malnutrition.
Men like smaller women, my mother once told me in a way that meant I’d bagged the gold. I was eleven, and attention from her male friends was the very thing I worked hard to avoid.
I lied. There was one book I owned as a child.
I have no idea who gave it to me. It was beautiful, with folk stories and an abundance of illustrations that captured my imagination. It didn’t last long. My sister cut the images out and used them as paper dolls. Along with the pictures, the stories were also destroyed. Recently, this same sister put up a Facebook post of her and I cut out like paper dolls from an old photograph. We were neatly trimmed out of the wedding shot on the church steps—mother and her second husband removed from behind us. All that was left were the fingers of second- husband’s hand on my shoulder and my seething scowl. When the need arose during this short-lived marriage, we kids would fight him. Once I wrapped my body around his legs like a little Kamikaze, digging a fork into the flesh of his legs to stop him pushing our mother’s face into a sink of hot water.
I never did call him dad. And I was often punished for it.
* * *
I house-sat for the acclaimed writer Peter Wells not long before he passed. During my time on Napier Hill feeding his cats, I heard about the houses that had been removed in my old suburb of Maraenui in an attempt to dislodge the gang infestation. I no longer lived in Hawkes Bay, so I hadn’t seen the old neighbourhood since my mother’s third marriage to Albert, who relocated the family to Invercargill, where the freezing works were still hiring. He disappeared after just six months. I hadn’t realised then that he was going straight for the first time. The ex-Keeper of Arms for the local Mongrel Mob, straight life was too much of a challenge, and he ended up behind bars for burglary. Albert was the only one of my mother’s partners I ever missed, and I even kept the giant teddy he probably stole for me until my husband took its place in my bed.
Toni Morrison said, ‘Anything dead coming back to life hurts.’
I wasn’t keen to revive the dead, but I was curious enough to revisit the house of the Kamikaze forks. I planned to view the house objectively and project the outline of that childhood like images through a lightbox before tracing. Then, I could spotlight the neighbourhood onto a blank page and see what dimensional planes I could shift to gain a symbolic perspective. To turn that gritty and textured history into pure information for a story. So, I got in the car and headed for the neighbouring suburb. Within ten minutes, I passed the old shopping centre with its windows boarded up and entered Percy Spiller Ave. A respectful name given in remembrance to the man who actively sought to make Napier a better place.
But Maraenui was never a better place.
Where dozens of state houses once sat, there were fields of grass. Trees that were once ignored had grown into mature beauty. With all the buildings gone, the house we lived in stood out even more than it had when we lived there. It still felt ominous, with the cracked chimney like a knife scar from a fight and the windows dark as dead eyes. Still dirty-white and open to the world on the fenceless corner. It was so exposed on its quarter-acre rise that it always felt like our lives were easily accessible to anyone trying to ply open the paint-sealed windows in the night. I pulled the car over to the kerb. The car engine idle ran through me like a shiver.
To my left, across the expanse of grassland that was once a park lined by several two-story fourplex units, sat the culprit of the deconstructed suburb. The gang headquarters with a jagged fence and an unobstructed view of what was left of the neighbourhood. I snapped a couple of photos on my phone. In the side mirror, a car approached so slowly that it almost sauntered up beside me. An old red Honda Accord full of shadowed faces aimed at me as the car passed.
‘I used to live here,’ I called out the window as if I was still one of them.
Soon, another car approached. This time fast and close enough that my car wavered. These darkened figures held their arms out the window, wielding the hand sign of the Mongrel Mob.
Time to go.
The children that once lived in that house have been neatly cut out and glued onto other landscapes. There is no return. Nor any desire to do so. I have been brutal in this same way at times in my life. That white house in Maraenui wasn’t the only item I cut out of my emotional memory. There have been many careful surgical incisions and removals used as forms of self-preservation. This I understand. Other areas of deletion I don’t, like the dancing. I used to love dancing. As a child, I dreamed of becoming a ballerina. But the freedom to dance switched off when I left Hawkes Bay.
Just like that. Off. I’m still not sure why.
‘All the best,’ Peter wrote to me. The last of our communication that began with the publication of my first novel. ‘Our lives are so strange aren’t they – fitting into costumes and putting on wigs and moustaches – but always straining for the body to be completely real, to sweat and feel fear and pleasure.’
I always admired the raw honesty of his words.
* * *
The impulse to hide, to hold myself apart, explains the social anxiety that caused my desire for invisibility. When you spend a significant part of your life in self-inflicted loneliness, there is a disconnection from the world and yourself, which is incredibly harmful. And it’s true. Although every inch of you is crying out to be noticed, it’s that same attention that you shun. As a result, you become hypervigilant to the threat that society is perceived to be through the experience of being shunned in the first place. This, in turn, creates a vicious cycle where the lonely person becomes increasingly more isolated, suspicious, and withdrawn while at the same time desiring like crazy that others would be interested in them.
For so long, I would speak quickly and quietly. I used minimal words to make my sentences because I wanted the attention shifted elsewhere. To say thank you with a semblance of comfort was incredibly hard. Eye contact was another difficulty. To be looked at, I learnt growing up, meant someone wanted to hurt you, take advantage of you, or mock you. I was easy pickings, I realise, now that I look back. Fear does that — it makes you vulnerable. So does the neglect of a parent.
‘I know your type’, I was told by the head of the social welfare department. He was filling in for my usual social worker, who was away sick. He sat across his desk and informed me that I’d be a dropout, pregnant by 18, a social welfare mum forever breeding brats.
I’d never met him before. After a year spent in Borstal, an aunt and uncle took me in because I had previously decided that rather than remain under my mother’s roof, I preferred to sleep on the streets and steal what I needed. I had settled into school in my uncle’s house, attending every day like a normal young person and gaining traction. I couldn’t believe the social welfare man hadn’t recognised my progress. I had just turned 14. Still a child. But with the same strength of that much younger me who got up and out of the doctor’s office, the one that refused to call an abusive man father, I also refused this tirade. I mustered my courage, lifted myself out of the chair and made my legs walk towards the door. I thought he might catch me before I had time to turn the handle, but I was swift enough and soon free of his influence.
I left without a word, his angry voice following me down the corridor to come back and sit down. To him, my behaviour was proof of my continuing delinquency. To me, my delinquency was the strength I needed to say no. And it’s still here when I need it.
Often, I think about what I would say if I saw that man again, but all the anger is gone. He is now a mere smear of colour, scraped back into the sludge of oil paint. I have control of that madness. I have used that man’s words to produce new work. A poem. An essay. A character in a book. That’s what writing does. It’s cathartic that way. My continuing journey of transformation is not merely the result of external validation but from the shift from fear to dare.
Since my world was full of negative experiences from childhood, I expected nothing but more of the same from the world around me. However, if I surprise my brain by daring to get out of my comfort zone and face the risk of humiliation and failure to overcome fear, then new connectors are created when the failure doesn’t occur. Thus, new responses are formed. This journey began in 2004 when I decided to get up for the open mike at Poetry Live in Auckland as many Tuesday nights as possible. I shook and mumbled, hated every minute I was up there and hated myself even more when I sat back down. But I pushed on.
Eventually, it got more manageable for me to get up behind the microphone. Not easy, but easier. Now I recognise the nerves as energy and positively use that energy, no longer telling myself I’m no good or that no one’s listening. I am learning to connect with an audience in a personal way. To direct myself towards them and give back what they have given by rocking up to see me speak. It’s a process of gratitude that gives me great joy. Relaxes me. Allows me to be me.
The thing is, as much as we want to forget, or as much as someone else wants us to forget, we never do. The ghost that’s always coming for me, I realise, is my mother.
I still cannot escape her. Though, I wonder if there is something in her character I could draw out and write about. I think I feel strong enough to face her now. I have even started to dance again in a crazy can’t stop me kind of way. In an, I don’t care how I look kind of way. It’s so liberating. And I am so well-loved these days by a husband of 40 years that he would not let anyone else buy Toby’s painting, and now Mrs Elegance 1986 hangs on the wall in our house.
So, here she is—the past, looking over her shoulder in my direction, waiting to see if I’ve got the guts to write about it. And I’m ready to face her, at long last. The her that is her. The her that is me. Who knows what will come of it—I’m open to the possibilities.
