Hags by Victoria Smith

Author:Victoria Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780349726953
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Thinking of the children

It’s February 2020, one month prior to the UK’s first lockdown, and I’m in a room called The Sinner’s Enclosure; it says so on the door. The man and the woman to whom I am talking are mortified about this.

‘We’re very sorry,’ they say. ‘If we have to come down another time, we’ll insist that they give us somewhere else, maybe even try another hotel.’

I tell them it’s fine; part of me finds it vaguely, inappropriately amusing (though I don’t say that).

‘Oh, no,’ says the woman. ‘It could have been terrible. For some of the adults we talk to, the abuse took place in a religious institution. Can you imagine how they’d respond to seeing a name like that?’

I say that would indeed be terrible. I haven’t been abused in a religious institution. Nothing that bad has happened to me. Nothing very bad at all, in fact. I say I’m sorry for those other people. Rather me in The Sinner’s Enclosure than them, ha ha.

I’m trying to tread a very fine line. I don’t want the woman and the man to think I’m wasting their time. They’ve travelled a long way to hear me make my statement, had to stay overnight, in a hotel so posh it has meeting rooms with ridiculous names on the door. This must be costing a lot of money. I don’t want it to seem like I’m taking the piss. Then again, neither do I want it to look like I’m making too big a deal of something that happened a long time ago. It’s just a memory, a memory about bodies. I don’t want to be overthinking it, making it mean something it never meant at the time.

‘I’m sorry, this is really nothing,’ I keep saying.

‘No, it’s all very important,’ they insist, but then they would. I’m trying not to keep second-guessing what I must look like to them.

The truth is this: I’m in several places at once. Young self, old self, whore, prude. My older children are approaching their teens, and I’m watching being twelve years old from the outside, thinking how young it is, hoping they know less than I did then. I contacted the child abuse inquiry telling myself I would play a part in fixing the future, though I now wonder if I am in fact attempting to revise the past. Think nice thoughts. That’s what you tell yourself when you disassociate. I’ve become less good at this the older I’ve got.

The older I’ve got, the more I’ve found myself edging towards becoming that most grotesque of creatures, the middle-aged mummy who worries about breaches in safeguarding and premature sexualisation and adults preying on minors. All those Schrödinger’s events which we know actually happen, which might even have happened to us, but which we simultaneously write off as conspiracy-theory-driven moral panics. All that made-up shit only family values conservatives and bored, Mumsnet-addled housewives pretend to care about in order to demonise outsiders. Since I hit my forties, I’ve started caring about them.

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