Voices by Jade Green
TW: Mention of self-harm
An audio version of this story is available to listen to at the bottom of this page.
1.
Princess Diana is dead
The voices begin in earnest when you are around seven, and at first they are your friends. You go on adventures together, conjuring fantastical worlds populated by strange and exciting creatures. You name your new friends King and Bella. Six long weeks of summer stretch ahead like an unending road. King pictures sandcastles, the swell of the sea, and slot machines in the arcade turning your fingers to metal. Bella says she can almost taste the smell of the pier; sugared donuts, hot oil, fish and chips. The best fish and chips you ever ate.
In the car on the way there, your mum sings along to Toni Braxton beside you; freed from work for two weeks, she is beaming with love and light. You can tell you are getting close by how many turns there are in the road, how much greener your surroundings are becoming and the smell of cow dung thickening the air. King and Bella talk at length about that first delicious dip in the cool water.
Home is already forgotten as you climb out of the car and stretch your sleeping limbs. Cousins, aunties, uncles, dogs emerge from nowhere and tumble towards you on a wave of welcoming love, the magnitude of which you are probably too young to appreciate. All you care about is the beach, a place so perfect you are sure it was built just for you. Kids and adults separate into their respective camps to play, talk, catch up. Gold light from lit rooms illuminates the dusk. You are too excited to sleep and stay up most of the night suppressing giggles while crickets chirrup through the windows.
You cannot finish the giant plate of fried breakfast that is placed in front of you, despite your best efforts. A coat of sun cream is applied thickly to your skin. Family members pile into cars, and you find yourself on the winding road you and your friends have envisioned for weeks, the one which ends in the sand.
They are excited to play. The rocks and caves and watery depths contain within them secret worlds only you and they can access. Now their chorus rings out across the ocean. ‘Hurry,’ says Bella, ‘we don’t have much time!’ And you feel a twinge of sadness when you realise she is right.
A princess has been captured by the evil sea-god that lives inside the cracks of the cliff face and it is your job to rescue her. You must bypass many rock-monsters and vanquish the sea-god’s army of guards with the help of King’s special fighting powers. Using the magic of the seashell tokens you have gathered along the journey, you slay the sea-god in a final, climactic battle and bring the princess home.
By the end of the afternoon, with chapped lips and skin a shade darker, you re-join your family gathering their towels and beach bags. The sandcastle city you built with your cousins is almost gone, collapsed turrets leaving long streaks on the glistening shore before the waves come back to finish their erasure. You beg for one last swim, but your mum has already packed your things. She promises you will come back; there’s lots of time, after all, we’ve only just got here. But your glumness at the prospect of leaving lingers, souring the bliss you so desperately want to prolong. You hear Bella ask timidly: ‘does no one else feel sad?’, then you climb into the stuffy heat of the car and watch the beach recede through the window.
Days pass by in a haze of distractions. You visit the arcades and play every game there, moving key rings and teddy bears across shelves of clinking coins behind glass panes. You stuff your face with hot dogs and candy floss and salty chips served in cones. Your feet stick to the patterned carpet as you watch older kids shoot at targets on a screen. Out on the pier you look down at reflections of neon lights cracking and bouncing on the ocean’s black surface and wonder what it would be like to fall in.
Now there is only one day left. Your uncle takes you and your cousins to the merry-go-round at the end of the shore and buys you all ice creams. When it is your turn to get on, you let King choose your horse, a beautiful blue and green creature with ‘Talia’ painted on her side. When you get off you are vibrating. The ice cream churns in your stomach. Your uncle asks if you are OK and you promise him yes, but by the time you have reached the car park pink vomit splatters across the tarmac.
Your mum made you narrow your seashell collection down to the top five and they sit inside the bucket in the car boot, caked in sand. Tearful goodbyes are happening between family members on the pavement. You stand still, hanging your head. Tears begin to stream when your mum bundles you into the front seat, anticipating a tantrum. The twinkling line of the sea hangs behind the rows of houses, shrinking slowly into the distance as the car pulls away. Pale hands flutter in the rear-view mirror. You plead with your mum to take you back, to let you move here permanently, but she is staring stonily at the road ahead. You can see the dull dread of Monday morning in her eyes. ‘I don’t want to go home,’ King says, ‘why does no one ever listen to us?’
2.
Queen Elizabeth II celebrates Golden Jubilee
You are ashamed to be naked. This is why you change hurriedly in the toilet cubicle after P.E so you can avoid showering and sprint out through the changing rooms which smell like sweat and old socks before the teacher sees you. The air outside the sports building is crisp against your hot skin and you feel free for a brief, shining moment. Then you spot a group of girls, all of whom hate you, heading in your direction. You turn on your heels and walk quickly away.
There is pain in your body all the time now. You find it hard to sleep. The voices in your head are no longer your friends; at some point they augmented and turned against you, names fading into childhood memories. Now they give endless commentary on everything you do, everything you are. You’re getting fatter. A hairy, disgusting beast. The pink marks crawling up your thighs and stomach make you look stretched, bloated, balloon-like. You’ll never stop growing. Observing your changing reflection only generates more abuse, so you avoid it when you can, blocking mirrors and drowning your new body in oversized clothing.
You expected your first period to gush out of you like a swollen river, but its arrival is far less dramatic, a brown jam emerging stiltedly out of a pain so acute it causes you to semi-faint on your bedroom floor while Buffy blares from the little television on your dresser. You understand, now, what she is fighting. You are a woman and there is only pain. You are too embarrassed to tell your mum about your new monthly arrival and hide your used pads and their wrappers in a secret bin in your wardrobe, next to a bag stuffed with old Barbie dolls. When you finally pluck up the courage to tell her, she wraps her arms around you and says that she is so, so sorry.
Men treat you differently now. The ones in your family look at you with raised eyebrows and go on about how tall you are getting as if they don’t know what else to say. Your posture begins to stoop. You grow your hair so that it covers your face. A man on the street tells you to ‘smile’ but you are too scared to respond. Your cowardice is punished with a torrent of hot anger that will sustain itself for days, weeks, years…you will still be fuming over the moment he told you to ‘smile’ decades from now. The voices tell you to retreat inside yourself because it is the only place that is safe; they are the only ones you can trust. You do as they say, because you are them and they are you.
A girl at school tells you your tits are saggy. You hate your new body so much that you want to cause it damage, scraping marks across your arms using your mum’s pinking shears. The pain is hot and scratchy. Every day you wish to stop growing, because you tower over most of the boys in your year and feel unbearably awkward standing next to your perfect petite friends. You do everything to avoid P.E lessons and start regularly bunking off, forging notes to give to tutors.
Whereas in Primary School you were beloved by teachers and found lessons easy, learning here is purged of fun. The classrooms are ugly, colourless, and the teachers project their self-disdain onto the students by making examples of them. You are screamed at for doodling in your homework diary and told to ‘speak up’ when you raise your hand to answer a question. It is safer to stay quiet.
The one lesson in which you find some solace is English. You read thick novels and feel alive. The teacher likes you and the classroom is made of old mahogany, a smell you find comforting though you can’t explain why. These hour-long lessons are the only place there is hope.
When the final bell rings you hurry to leave school, the muscles in your chest getting tight. The gates are a scary place at this time of day and you walk through them as fast as you can to avoid being seen. The parents lined up in their cars wear the same grim expression as the children, tired eyes peering out from murky windshields at the sea of students disembarking. You think you have escaped the rabble but by the time it’s too late you spot them, gathered on the corner of the pavement, watching you scuttle along. The voices tell you to run, but you manage to compose yourself.
You hear them giggling and muttering about your saggy tits as you pass, and pray they will just let you go.
But then the chorus begins. Your stomach clenches. ‘Saggy tits! Saggy tits! Saggy tits!’ They get louder and more gleeful with each repetition. ‘Goff! Goff! Saggy tits!’ The symphony echoes across the street, inviting looks and sniggers from the other students. You cannot tell if they are following you and quicken your pace on the wet pavement. Then you are around the corner, safe in your solitude.
Why didn’t you say anything? Stand up for yourself! You are pathetic. You should’ve said…
You hold back the tears until you get home, running straight upstairs to your room. Collapsing onto the bed, you howl into the pillow until there is nothing left. Still, the voices continue. They’re going to beat the shit out of you next time. What will you do then? They’re right about your saggy tits. You’re disgusting.
You can’t wait until you are old enough to get out of this place, to choose your life, to be free.
3.
Icelandic ash cloud grounds UK flights
You awaken to the sound of someone vomiting. Students clustered in the alley behind your halls again. Consciousness stirs the voices, returning from their booze-induced recess. What time is it? How did you get home? What embarrassing thing are you forgetting?
There is another blank space in your memory, soon to be filled with gradients of shame, worry, regret. The room smells of takeaway grease. Your body is one big bruise. People say these are the happiest years.
Flashes coming back to you, now; a smoky dancefloor; a boy in a beanie hat trying to kiss you; spilled beer and broken glass beneath your feet. Tonight you will do it all again. Drink up. Have fun. These are the good times, before the real work begins. Grey offices, bad bosses, ergonomic chairs. You’ve heard all about it from your parents. For now, you have cheap wooden furniture and empty bottles lining the windowsills. There isn’t much time. Enjoy it while you can. You’re only young once.
Other students are having the time of their life, so what is wrong with you? Night after night you smile, drink, try to fit in. Learn to play your part. You surround yourself with groups of strangers who also smile, drink, and appear to fit in. For a while this system works, but then the voices find cracks in your newfound popularity. Booze and bad sex can only drown them out for so long. At night, when everything is quiet, they are loud and hard in the black silence.
In the lecture halls, your professors’ words fall on empty ears. Information won’t stick around for long; your focus is a naughty child, roving, unruly. Writing essays is a chore. You’re scared to speak up in seminars because you don’t trust your opinion. Everyone knows more than you. So you keep your head down, get on with it, until it’s time to drink again.
Since you were 13 you’ve been training for this. It started with Bacardi Breezers, fizzy pink liquid in bright-labelled bottles that made your head sugar-light. By the time you had worked your way up to bourbon, you wore your ability to drink like a medal of honour. You were a pioneer, following in the footsteps of your family. The more your drank, the quieter the voices became, dissolving like ice in the bottom of each glass. You were suddenly confident, popular, pursued. A person you actually liked. A person other people liked. You felt powerful, having found a way to silence them. Maybe you could be free.
But in the mornings, when you hear the vomit and smell the grease, they come back alive and you remember that you are stuck with them. They scream at you while you tremble in the shower. Nobody really likes you. Those people are not your friends. They are there while you eat breakfast, walk to lectures, sit alone in the library with stacks of books and paper. You are utterly boring and nothing will ever change. Language has betrayed you. Your passion for words died when you came here. You will fail. The clock on the wall counts down the minutes to the pub.
But things do change. You meet a girl, fall in love, and for a while everything is different. She is the Cool Girl you always wished you were, and miraculously, she likes you. Somehow you get the sense that she, too, is damaged, alone, destroyed by voices. The revelation brings you relief. You watch movies in her room. Go to the park when you should be in lectures. For a while, sharing the pain makes you feel less of it. Denial is easier with company. Absorbing her needs and suppressing your own makes you a good girlfriend. Love means putting others first. You forget about your damage by adopting her dysfunction.
The forgetting is only temporary. When you are lying next to her in the dark, the voices tell you that if she knew who you really were, who they know you are, she would not stick around. She can do better than you. But you ignore them as best you can, and carry on playing the roles happy couples play. One day she will see you. After graduating you follow her to a new city. This won’t last, and what will you do when it’s over? Perhaps love will be enough to fix you.
Things fall apart as quickly as they started. The voices were right; eventually she sees you for what you really are and the life you have created together shatters. You are alone again. Your companions have become more hateful since love deprived them of attention. You’re stupid, ugly, unfixable. Too broken to be loved. Selfish for having needs and wanting to be wanted. No wonder it didn’t work. Now you’re adrift in an alien land, surrounded by strangers who smile, drink, and fit in where you don’t belong. You get a job with a desk and an ergonomic chair. For a while the routine soothes you. There is comfort in the repetition of days. The voices tell you how lucky you are. There are people starving. You are young and free and privileged. So why aren’t you happy?
4.
World locked down as Covid-19 spreads
You are a bad writer.
She is right on cue. You remind yourself that you don’t have to listen; you are older and wiser and understand, now, that this voice is not ‘you’. But the intellectual understanding is easier than the moment-to-moment practice of keeping the voice in her place.
Your life is too boring to be written about.
It helps to visualise the voice belonging to a tiny, annoying child tugging at your sleeve, whining, stamping her feet. All she wants is your attention. To return to a time when she had full control over you and every decision you made.
You are a fraud. Might as well give up. This isn’t working.
You let out a defeated sigh. Relent. Click on the Chrome icon at the bottom of the screen and start scrolling, your mind already idle. You scroll and scroll and scroll some more, your whole consciousness inhabited by the anger and suffering of a thousand chattering voices, only now they don’t belong to you. You notice what you are doing a few seconds too late and close the browser, disgusted by your lack of self-discipline.
This is why you will never be a real writer.
Battling the voice is tiring. For a while you type words, delete them, type more, delete, like treading water in the middle of a vast, empty ocean. Your resources are depleting. Somewhere in the midst of this exhaustion, another voice pipes up, gentler than the first: You should be good to yourself, and leave it for today. You tried your best. Go and do something to relax. And although you know that this voice is lying, you haven’t tried your best as evidenced by the stark absence of words on the page, it is easier to believe.
The next day is better. You find the rhythm you are searching for in the language and follow it, words rising to the surface of your consciousness faster than you can type. It’s like magic. The thing you know as ‘you’ is gone, the story taking shape on the page arising out of a force far beyond the limits of your mind. Hours go by, but you don’t notice. Strings of sentences occupy your full field of awareness.
Once again you are exhausted, but it is a different exhaustion than yesterday. Your eyes drift over the pages now filled with pleasing blocks of text. There is a voice, but it is faint. This is the best thing you have ever written. Maybe you can do it.
Swept away on this rare surge of self-belief, your mind plays its library of scenes bookmarked for just this occasion; you are winning writing awards; receiving high-paying commissions for your work; telling stories of your struggles to admiring fans. That night, when you fall asleep, the fantasies continue as divine abstractions.
In the morning you sit at the computer. But when you open the document to pick up where you left off, you notice something is wrong. Scanning the last few paragraphs you wrote, you realise with horror that yesterday’s success was a delusion. The writing in front of you is awful; badly-formed sentences and amateur prose, grammar so clunky a child could’ve written it. How could you have thought this was any good?
You are a bad writer, and this story is going nowhere.
For a full ten minutes you sit with your disappointment. The voice was right all along. Any hopes you had for a good day of writing are crushed.
You let out a despondent sigh. Relent. Click the Chrome icon at the bottom of the screen and start scrolling. You scroll and scroll and scroll some more, your whole consciousness inhabited by the anger and suffering of a thousand chattering voices, and haven’t you been here before, will you never learn?
You’re not taking this seriously. Give up, go back to the 9-5, it’s all you’re good for…
Managing to push the voice away, you sit staring at the swarm of bad sentences on the screen, the flashing cursor waiting patiently for your next move. You have a choice now: you can push through, or give up. Push through, give up. Push through…
Your eyes wander to the photograph you have blu-tacked to the wall in front of your desk. Taken by your granddad when you were around seven, the photo shows you leaning over a coffee table engrossed in a book. You are looking up at the camera the moment he must’ve called your name. Keeping the photo close is supposed to remind you to have empathy with yourself, but you picked it because it’s honest. You recognise in your seven-year-old eyes a sense of wonder. This photo reminds you why you write. It reminds you who you are below the busy voices causing ripples on your surface, reminds you of the place at the bottom of the lake where there is always stillness.
Jade Green
Jade is a writer, editor and podcast host, currently working on her second novel. She believes in the transcendent power of writing to open us up to other worlds and experiences; her protagonists are usually fierce women smashing the patriarchy one story at a time.