I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

by Maggie O'Farrell

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I could have said that I have an instinct for the onset of violence. That, for a long time, I seemed to incite it in others for reasons I never quite understood. If, as a child, you are struck or hit, you will never forget that sense of your own powerlessness and vulnerability, of how a situation can turn from benign to brutal in the blink of an eye, in the space of a breath. That sensibility will run in your veins, like an antibody. You learn fairly quickly to recognise the approach of these sudden acts against you: that particular pitch or vibration in the atmosphere. You develop antennae for violence and, in turn, you devise a repertoire of means to divert it.

The smell of catering and bars and other people’s holidays.

I have this compulsion for freedom, for a state of liberation. It is an urge so strong, so all-encompassing that it overwhelms everything else. I cannot stand my life as it is. I cannot stand to be here, in this town, in this school. I have to get away. I have to work and work so that I can leave, and only then can I create a life that will be liveable for me. I may appear flighty and capricious, talking to you one day, then retreating the next but, you see, I have to concentrate everything on freeing myself and nothing can get in my way. I cannot bear for anything or anyone to slow me down, distract me, fetter me.

I must, I now see, have driven her to distraction as a child: my intractability, my wildness, my irrational refusals, my craving for independence, my constant assertions of autonomy. “You were,” she is given to saying these days, with a sigh, “a nightmare to rear.” And I can believe it. Photographs of me show a gauche, awkward middle child, nose too large, teeth growing in crooked, a stormy yet wary expression on my face, a poorly rendered version of my prettier, more equable older sister. I was contrary. I had tantrums. I was given to screaming fits, emotional outbursts, peaks and troughs of passion. “Is she still difficult?” relatives would ask, with a wary air. They had only to spend half an hour in my company to know the answer.

I did try. I remember trying. I remember thinking that I mustn’t get riled, I mustn’t lose my temper, that I must above all stay in control. I would look at myself in the mirror and arrange my features into a calm smile and say the word good-natured to myself. I must have read it in a book. This was what I wanted to be, what I knew I ought to be. This was what nice children were: good-natured. But then I’d be told to wear a certain jumper, which was an offensive mustard colour, the neckline of which scratched and itched at my skin in an unbearable fashion and it would be boiled potatoes again for tea, and how I loathed their floury edges and their solid starchy interiors. A glass of milk would be waiting at my place-setting and I dreaded its drinking, the sinister silky coating of it as it passed down my gullet, the jaundiced swirls of cream on its surface, the pearlescent bubbles at the rim. I would be thinking all these things and then something minor, something innocuous, would happen—a comment or a look from my sister, a foot jostling against mine as I was trying to read, a page of maths homework that seemed endless and impenetrable and yawning—and there I would go. A breaking sensation somewhere in my chest, a flood of heat to the head, a sudden screech, perhaps a stamped foot. Control lost. A nature not good at all.

That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do. You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it. The best way, I am about to discover, is not always the easy way.

the priest must have taken my arm because when we stop falling, when the plane seems to come up against something, we are all violently thrown upwards again before finally levelling out, and I feel the clench of his fingers near my elbow, his rosary beads pressing into my flesh. In a day or two, Anton will ask me what the strange row of marks on my arm is, and I will look down and see them, a novena of bruises.

To be so unheard, so disregarded, so disbelieved: I was unprepared for this. I also felt helpless, blocked in.

I have read too many novels and watched too many films about babies swapped at birth, babies who weren’t issued with an identity bracelet.

The people who teach us something retain a particularly vivid place in our memories. I’d been a parent for about ten minutes when I met the man, but he taught me, with a small gesture, one of the most important things about the job: kindness, intuition, touch, and that sometimes you don’t even need words.

the noise sets up a ringing in my ear. The tinnitus of the terrified.