Gail Varga

The Wild Times had been raging for much longer than my little life. Generations of my people before me had been living under the burden of fear and had been driven to desperate measures to stay alive, often clinging to degradation rather than giving up. Unsuitable marriages were made in delusional attempts to change things for the better, but husbands in particular tended to die in accidents of one sort or another which only complicated things and left strings of loose-bowelled children squabbling at the queue for the outhouse.

Stealing was commonplace, and possibly vital, in my ancestry. Everyone did it as a means to eat and provide other basic necessities. I might not be here today if it wasn’t for the stealing, so I have an especially fond feeling about the wealth of those acquisition opportunities. It is in me as well: a kind of innate instinct for when something is available, whether I need it or not. I am very proud of that skill and it has probably advanced my life hugely, if only by extremely subtle degrees. I am thankful to the world for giving up all those things that it doesn’t miss anymore.

Although I have never stolen it, I have been led to understand that cardboard was one of the prized items to come home with in yesteryear amongst my people. Apparently it was very important as insulation during the worst bleak periods of weather: around bodies, to sleep on, over holes in walls, covering windows. The darkness of those windowless hovels must have been almost as bad as the Wild Times outside.

But despite the surprisingly good quality of the cardboard back then, some of the family, sadly, were driven to desperate measures to cease to be alive. Imagine. The world was in turmoil though: what else could you have expected but a little of this? Clearly it is not the same as someone curvaceous, loved, safe, living in a warm, bright house filled with windows and doors deciding to end it all. (I’ve heard of such people: they never, ever look for these blunt, final answers.) Still, it wasn’t easy, whatever rationale you applied. A few furniture throwing incidents bracketed the odd suicide, some tears.

I suppose the other relatives (who didn’t kill themselves) coped in various ways, but I wouldn’t say any of them were totally unaffected. It is difficult to remain unaffected by the sort of things that went on, to hold your head up, maintain equilibrium and relate to life in a straightforward way. Inevitably there was a little strangeness and some of them had to be restrained. Great Uncle Lollo was the most severe case in recent times. He strayed from the path early on in his youth, lost the ability to distinguish between path and not path and had to be tethered to a stake to stop him wandering into trouble or danger. I only saw him at the stake stage of course, which wasn’t very pretty or dignified if you thought about it, but I suppose we had all become accustomed to it. Twenty-four hours a day he was strapped up in his little harness made of rough webbing, with a line attached right in the middle of his back where he couldn’t fiddle with it. He had a separate shed home near the stake and simply went indoors, still tethered, if he wanted shelter or sleep. For me, he was a safe person to talk to, and I believe he understood some things in some ways, even if he couldn’t explain them in words. I would tell him my hopes and dreams when I was a girl and he would become most enthusiastic, nodding and repeating, ‘Nya, nya!’ whilst holding his arms aloft as if in thanks to some celestial force for the first sweet rain after the great dryness. If I spoke of my fears or troubles he simply hung his head and said, ‘Mm, mm,’ and suchlike, sometimes sniffing slightly. I have always wondered if he might have been happier than the rest of us, after giving up caring like he had. Mostly heedless of the Wild Times in his environs, he would wave his arms majestically around, conducting a symphony, if often unheard (the birds, the leaves, the clouds), smiling and working his gummy jaws at the same time. I had a lot of respect for Great Uncle Lollo.

Mother was different. I didn’t have respect for Mother. Clearly suffering from her boggy journey through life, she passed through her plate smashing phase and simply went quiet and still, just rocking occasionally. It was strange though, there was something about her. How did she manage to keep going without appearing to move? How did she surreptitiously eat or defecate (I can’t think of anything else that I definitely know she must have done)? They will always remain unanswered questions for me now, obviously. I had heard tell of her extraordinary intelligence, but that was impossible to confirm and equally impossible to imagine, although I will admit that she really was the ultimate talent amongst all the people I had ever met, or even heard about, when it came to hiding: as still as a rock, camouflaged in part by her very inertia, but un-seeably fast when fear of being seen gripped her. Anyway, it made me rather unwell to look at her, so mostly I did not.

Mother’s other child, my much bigger sister Menith, was around too. We weren’t what you’d call close, but there was a mutual toleration if not any deep understanding. Menith’s life took a funny turn at the Wild Times Fair in the year that she began to go through her change phase to fat lumpiness. It was her defining moment. The fair itself was a great event. I have since learned of bunting and music and so on, but if this is what you associate with a country fair, put the image from your mind. Everyone had to bring what weapons they could for a start, just in case the Wild Times struck at the wrong moment. Similarly, bright colours were out, as were noise and commotion. The twenty or so visitors turned out in immaculately dull clothes, full and square-ish, swamping their shape. They enjoyed various permutations on the theme of whispering games whilst huddled in small groups in an open field high up on the hillside, twitching their eyes from side to side and nervously looking over their shoulders in case of the approach of anything unwanted. The big feature was the Wild Times Raffle. Small pieces of paper secretly passed from hand to hand while everyone looked the other way, and somehow my sister became known as the winner, if only unto her. The surprising thing that she won was to obsess her for the rest of her days (as far as I know): a lifetime’s supply of nail varnish. That became Menith. She was always painting her nails after that, fingers and toes: rather boring and certainly useless I thought. She was very tetchy about getting it right though, lost as she was in the dizzying world of self-decoration most of the hours of most of her days.

The other person was Uncle Heap. He was the most extraordinary person I ever met, my hero, my teacher, my Uncle Heap. What big, veiny hands he had. What tatty, stained overalls he wore. What strange and beautiful secrets we shared.

Then of course, last of all, there was me, born a baby after the cardboard era but not within sight of bunting and music. I eyed the family without comment or participation mostly. I was just there.

Mother spoke to me once after I was about hip high. She said, ‘You’re doomed.’

I hoped that what she had really meant to say was, ‘I’m doomed,’ but I was botheringly uncertain (until I eventually found out for sure). She looked at me askance once or twice in the years that followed.

I had no idea of what I might be interested in. I had had a go at conducting with Great Uncle Lollo, but showed no aptitude for the music. Coloured fingernails and toenails were the most irrelevant things I could think of, and neither silence nor inertia grabbed me either. I sorely wanted for role models. What with mother rocking (or not rocking as was more usually the case), Menith seeing to her manicure or pedicure and Great Uncle Lollo conducting, it was left to dear Uncle Heap and me to stand watch against the Wild Times almost all day and night. In those hours on watch I learned a lot. It became apparent, under Uncle Heap’s direction, that I had a fearsome growl to give when the Wild Times came too close (which was very often indeed). For many years this was most of what I knew about myself, this growl, but it was a good thing to know first, given the circumstances.

Amidst these growing growls, I like to think that some nugget of human normality was in me when I was born and when I was small (even smaller than I am now) and, furthermore, that I somehow spotted it and cached it smartly away, not totally knowing what it was, but sensing its importance and tucking it safely up in a deeply buried packet before anything odd happened to it. I must have forgotten about it as I grew up, but Uncle Heap suspected something when I started to smile and helped me look for it. Wise Uncle Heap. And that is the nugget of my story: what I have done with my nugget (so far).