Magpie

When being crazy is not only safe, but necessary

The kitchen smells of dewberry body spray from The Body Shop, cold toast and this song. We are sitting in the long narrow kitchen at the back of my friend Rachel’s house. My school blazer is on the back of my chair, I have tucked my tie, carefully mis-tied to look small, into the third buttonhole of my non-regulation school shirt. I stand slightly and wiggle my cheap, tight, grey and slightly bobbled Lycra skirt down over my thin laddered tights. The ladder has been controlled with a swipe of clear nail varnish, a trick we women learn young. I am fourteen.

Though the uniform was non-regulation, it was an absolute law among ninety per cent of Year Nines at my school, because when you hit Year Nine these things matter, and the school, though well respected, had bigger battles to fight. I take another bite of my toast, gone cold, spread with St Ivel Gold, a cheap butter alternative with an off, slightly chemical taste. It is potentially the best toast I have ever tasted, and it is at this very moment that my lifelong love of slightly burned cold toast and butter begins. They don’t make the spread anymore. I’ve searched and searched, but there is no comparable spread available.

My friend’s Mum is whirling around the kitchen, singing:

Eezer Goode, Eezer Goode / He’s Ebeneezer Goode.

My friend is embarrassed, but not ashamed. I grin at her Mum, who continues her spinning, unabashed. She always looks the same: skintight jeans and top, multiple gold chains, long brown hair slicked back, glasses with those thick lenses that magnify her big brown eyes. She is certifiably, beautifully, totally crazy. But safely so. She is a dressmaker, with a house above a shop in a small village outside my city. They have an aged miniature terrier called Twinkles, who sits on a small round cushion, trembling and snotty, in the living room every night. A name I squirrelled away and kept for my own giant dog, years later, which made it even funnier.

I stay here every Thursday, so Rachel and I can go to Girl Guides together in the next village. I don’t remember anything about the Guides, because we stood outside the hut swapping stories of boys, school dramas and how to lie to parents well enough to sneak out on a Friday, which is exactly what we did the night before, before going back for dinner at her house and chatting into the night, sleeping in the same bed, her cuddled up to me as though I were a stuffed animal. It felt good.

It all felt good.

Rachel’s parents were separated too. Her Mum was less usual, her life was, but somehow it was safer than mine. It wasn’t perfect: her Mum had a new boyfriend who was quite strict. But there were enough parallels that I felt I fitted or at least felt less of an outsider than usual. Thursday visits were a relief from my home life, where I couldn’t be me, and from most of my friendships, where I had to hide my home life to get by. Here was a place where being less usual, even a little crazy, was not only safe but essential.

I have written before about trying on lives, adapting, making myths and stories to get by. But there was something else I did too, something truer. I collected shiny moments like this one and preserved them perfectly, and they return now at random, gathered up and added to the collage of me. The me that never disappeared, only lay buried beneath years of the wrong life, the wrong kind of crazy.

I don’t want to write about that here, I have elsewhere. I grew up under my mother’s delusions, which sometimes turned to paranoia and violence, but occasionally to unconventional magic. I am able to separate them now, and it’s this second kind I love. I love it because it’s a shiny thing I own, and goddamn it, it’s beautiful. It’s safe, it’s fun, it’s free.

At first I thought I collected shiny moments like this because I liked them and wanted to be them. It was only recently I realised I am them, at least on some level. And though it’s been growing slowly, it was maybe only yesterday I decided it was okay to own them.

Last year I met my eight-year-old best friend for coffee. She was laughing at a memory: we were ten, and she’d come over to see if I could play. Apparently, I answered the front door wearing nothing but my Mum’s fur coat and high heels, using a banana as a telephone, and said, “It’s the funny farm calling, we’ve come to take you away.”

So yes, I was a joker, and yes, I had to be. But there was also a particular eccentricity I hid away, because I thought it was wrong, or didn’t belong to me. A type that felt at home in the circus, that loved The Rocky Horror Picture Show, that wore my Mum’s coney fur coat to the pub in my teens when everyone else wore puffer jackets.

A type that takes midnight drives to watch the stars, wakes daughters for midnight feasts, learns Russian and handstands in lockdown. Not only safe, but essential. And I am letting it creep back in, carefully, a little scared, and I think that’s okay too.

Yesterday, on my walk, I hunted for the exact right music to raise the crazy dead in me: Tom Morello, the Tiger Lillies, Katzenjammer, Hugh Laurie. It felt good. Really good. Then I had to take my daughter to her school fete. I looked in my wardrobe for clothes that felt like me, not respectable ones, not socially acceptable ones. There was barely anything, but I got as close as I could, and took my time, to feel like me, only me, not what my mother, my daughters, or the school-gate hierarchy would find acceptable. Me, for me, only me.

I saw Rachel in Tesco, years ago now. Her Mum had had a stroke. She was okay, but she and her sister had had to explain to the hospital staff that her behaviour wasn’t due to the stroke, that it was, in fact, entirely normal for her, that she was well. She said it with the same twinkle I’d known when we were fourteen.

I have two special friends who read this when their busy lives allow, who live vibrantly, unconventionally, who I think have been less hidden from themselves than I have. We have a WhatsApp group we call The Coven. We meet, swap stories, drink wine or eat.

Rachel didn’t know what she was holding for me at fourteen. But I want these women to know what they are holding for me now. Because I could open the door in nothing but a fur coat, answering a banana phone, and I suspect they would laugh, and they would also tell me if I was crossing the road into slightly-less-than-okay funny farm town.

So my beautiful girls, this one is for you. Thank you for holding me.

Maybe that’s all any of us are really looking for. A handful of people who’ll laugh when we answer the door in a fur coat with a banana pressed to our ear, and who’ll also quietly take the banana away if one day it stops being a joke.

And it’s for all of us who live how we want, not how society dictates. It’s scary, and sometimes it dances on a fine line. But let’s hold each other steady enough to tap-dance along it, jazz hands out, spilling only the occasional drop of our cocktails, as we sing:

Viva la Crazytown.

Circus and Sick

River

Sea Shanties and Nail Marks