Rough Magic by Lara Prior-Palmer

Author:Lara Prior-Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948226196
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

XXII

It was 1968 when Aunt Lucinda went mute for a school term. She was fifteen years old. Apparently she wouldn’t even talk to friends. Her mother, my grandmother Gaga, found a poem Lucinda had written, and took her out of school for good. It was a bold decision, but so was the poem. It was set in a forest’s “cold bare hands,” Lucinda holding a leaf that crackles and breaks. She sees the leaf on the earth in pieces and declares her own leaf is

still holding out, though they’ve tried with all their strength

To crush me and make me fall . . .

I won’t I won’t . . .

I’ll stay alone in the cold friendless world

Striving for what I know is right.

It does sound a little dramatic. But after Lucinda was allowed to leave school, she won Badminton age nineteen. She would go on to win it five times more, on five different horses.

My fourteen-year-old self thought I should be a tennis player, even though I wasn’t much good. It was around this time my stomach ache began, a sea-deep irritation I struggled to articulate beyond claims of a dysfunctional digestive system. It proved a mystery to conventional doctors, too, though not to my father. “You’re just too tall,” he said. “Your intestines must be too long.”

Mum was also unconvinced. I presume she’d have sat up and listened if my diagnosis was death, but her daughter only had a tummy pain she couldn’t see. She said it was caused, like her ongoing headaches, by frustration. “Keeping it all pent up,” she’d say with a constipated expression. Maybe that was a subconscious instruction for me to be sexually free, a subject she wouldn’t otherwise broach. Yet I was at my freest at that time, unrestrained on London’s Friday nights.

My mother posted a strand of my hair to a psychic in Ireland, who rang five weeks later to announce I had anger and sadness in my belly. My London friends found this report really funny and began a daily inquiry as to the well-being of the monster inside me.

Time passed and Tummy Monster grew; their myth, my fact—until I learned to ignore it for long enough stretches that it became my myth too. People ceased asking. I suppose we think of pain as associated with an event—an accident, for example. We don’t imagine it going on forever. I found no space for pain and its expression in daily life.

These were the years when teachers were seeking a “cause” for my disruptive activities, dispatching me to a learning-difficulty center where I was declared dyslexic. One teacher at my previous school had blamed my behavior on my tormenting siblings. “Are your brothers at home at the moment?” she’d ask when I was in trouble or bullying a classmate. Then there was the woman who diagnosed me as a product of lifelong concussion. “I just think you’ve fallen off too many horses,” she finished, as though there were a brainy soup spilling round my head forever trying to solidify into its original state.

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