The walking wounded AbigAil george “The five of us carried our own hurts, heartaches, sadness, inner turmoil and heartbreaks in secrecy. Mother, father, brother and two sisters. What were we so afraid of, I screamed inside my head.” A short story w alking The wounded Abigail George An Ovi Magazine Books Publication 2022 Ovi Project Publication - All material is copyright of the Ovi magazine & the writer C Ovi books are available in Ovi magazine pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: submissions@ovimagazine.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book. T h e w a l k i n g w o u n d e d Abigail George A short story The walking wounded I t was only as a fully formed adult that I realised with a greater insight and awareness what we had all struggled for so long to keep under wraps; undercover. The five of us carried our own hurts, heartaches, sadness, inner tur- moil and heartbreaks in secrecy. Mother, father, brother and two sisters. What were we so afraid of, I screamed inside my head. It was criminal. We were the walking wounded. Yet we legitimised our reasons for keeping it this way. We wouldn’t want it any other way. We weren’t one big happy family but then again whose family was in those days. In the eighties it was the political struggle and internal con- flict of racism and prejudice that existed in the country of South Africa that took the burning bright edge off the im- print of dysfunctional, abnormal families. In the nineties it was the unforeseen future, the freedom of the liberators in Abigail George the struggle, the freeing of Nelson Mandela and in the new century it was the soccer World Cup, the Kyoto Protocol, the carbon footprint, the millennium bug, Mrs. Ples, the cradle of humankind and the fear that someday technology would somehow surpass humanity. It was all in all a ruthless game of pick-and-choose. It felt like either we had to pick whether or not to feel disheartened at the circumstances you found yourself in that day or you chose to feel happy, cheerful even keeping depression and wallowing in self-pity at bay. Parents do not mean to hurt their children or cause them sadness or undue pain. It hasn’t lost its darkness yet; this melancholy glow of my father’s sickness. What am I mourn- ing for now? I know now that gratitude only spills over into a rewarding and easy life. Dipping my head under the cool princely blue water in the local swimming pool I am finally free of the hold that planet earth has on me and my heart. I am totally enclosed; encased in a chlorinated bubble beyond any suffering or sorrow or human turmoil. In sea water I am well aware that it has the power to destroy human life or nourish other life in rock pools. Looking after my father’s ailing health has begun to consume me slowly. I stay awake late at night listening to his movements in his bedroom; as he gets up to go to the bath- room, as he turns and shifts in his bed. My mother’s voice a faint but distinct whisper as she berates him from waking her up. We’re just killing time till visiting hours. My father is in The walking wounded hospital again. This time he’s in a hospital in Port Elizabeth. The previous time it had been in Johannesburg. He had been hospitalised for lithium toxicity. He had come close to lying on his death bed. Something that was hard for us to under- stand as a family at the time. My brother said what felt like a million miles away on the telephone, “Get the ambulance.” But my mother just ignored my pleas. My brother’s voice was harsh. It had an edge to it that I supremely disliked. Like he was bossing me around. It reminded me of high school. My mother and I sit side by side in the lounge listlessly watching the 7 o’clock news and soap operas. In the mornings my mother sleeps late now that my father is in the hospital. She seldom gets up before noon. He lay sick in his bedroom for two days before we took him to the emergency room on Saturday evening. I must get used to this loneliness and this deep empty feel- ing. I don’t know how I am going to fill this new void in my life. It is as fluid, pure and visible like the bathroom light that captures the weight of water in a glass tumbler. I wait for her to come back from wherever my mother has gone with a sense of innate despair and trepidation. Not knowing whether something has gone wrong. Whether or not she will leave me forever and then what will I do. She simply leads her own life. I am 22. I am a film student watching Spike Lee movies with avid interest. I come to know about Malcolm X. In sum- mer I see the world through brand new eyes. Colours are bright and effulgent, seductive, exquisite, pale then vermil- Abigail George lion in the dappled sunlight of an afternoon in summer. In Johannesburg at the shelter I am staying at I am homesick for the sea, fish and salty chips in Port Elizabeth; those choppy soughing waves and the puce sunset reminding me of those ladies at church who wore lilac and smelt of lavender. I see life through brand new eyes; I have a brand new life, brand new successful poses. I am a reader, student of life, a female poet and writer while life goes on around me with a disapproving murmur about what I project. They want me to be a concerned, obedient wife and nursing mother, making beds and dusting furniture, having a lie in the af- ternoon, making mash, mince and mountains of green peas and having babies, holding a cigarette in my hand, wearing a housecoat and slippers or attending church at the Assembly of God. This is what is relevant in my life. I miss my books of poetry and of poets’ lives. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’, her admonitions and Anne Sexton’s world of machine madness. A world in which I was finally set free to do my own thing. I make lists, forget, blame, iron rumpled looking clothes, run errands, stick stamps on important looking blue airmail en- velopes. I promised myself I would do my very best to be happy today when the world became fresh and new once again and promised new beginnings. I was born to new realities too in my twenties. Before I knew it I had grown into a new identity. In front of my very own eyes I morphed into a silhouette with a smile. The walking wounded I’m still learning how to drive. While the drippy ice-cream with a flake melts on my lap, in the fixed mirror I study my pores while the car jerks back to life; under the pressure of my mother’s fingertips. I marvel at the way she drives just like I do at about everything she does. At a fancy restaurant, the production house where I work as a volunteer I have close encounters with the rich; people who don’t have to worry about money or where there next meal is going to come from. People who don’t live from pay cheque to pay cheque. The lemony, fragrant, bewitching juices of the lamb and the couscous dribble down her chin. The blonde catches it deft- ly with a napkin. There is a musical, frenetic energy around everyone. The waiters, the clientele, the cooks and the man- ager. Yet I’m still reminded of the poverty-stricken, I don’t quite belong here. There is no explanation as to why life is so unfair. The world is filled with people who want to be loved. But how quickly love turns to hate as a precaution and the heart grows bitter, unaccommodating and cold. People feel alone in different ways. People who think about committing suicide, case his- tories, missing persons, people on television screens They all make up relevant and unique pieces of history fragments that have to be sewn together, swept together in a variety, in an array of human bodies stirring disengaged, iso- lated, emboldened sweet nothings of memories. These frag- ments make me remember that when you are a child colours are brighter and when you grow up noises are louder Abigail George Words and poetry steal beauty in adolescence and puberty. They are in a way in a minority, like glowing gems, diamonds in the rough. In my house it was sometimes hard to escape. We each had our own bedroom but the walls were thin. Forget all the noise; let it disappear into the dark, let it veer into the core of a black hole says the voice of a sullen, hormonal, teenage girl. That was the voice of my journal as an adolescent. I was a book lost in translation. I could only position my feelings, my thoughts, my actions, reactions, responses into the one language that my parents could never understand. Into the voice of my secret diary. When I was a grown up in my parents’ house I could hear the frog croaking when I go to sleep just outside my window. In the morning he is gone. That is how life is – transient. It comes and it goes just as it pleases, with a will of its own. Something that humankind has no absolute control over. As a grown up I still feel as if I have missing parts though. All the love I have within me seems to belong to my broth- er and my sister now. My lungs licked into shape now that I have given up on smoking, heart – you tough, pulsating, beating little number, you heartache you, undiminished pain, sorrow like skinned knees from childhood, unmasked suffering; a world unseen. My depression has given me extraordinary creativity but it has also come with tremendous loss of life and sacrifice. De- pression is a marked rival to madness, despair and despond- ency. It complicates your life, your family relationships, your The walking wounded mind is black and your smile hovers at the corners of your mouth drawing you back from strangers to contact with your immediate support group, self-help and cognitive therapy. How can you compromise something over which you have no self-control? When my parents’ relationship began to flounder from an easy spell and fall into a battlefield, a hot heated war zone that knew no boundaries, no limitations we had to take cover and recover from the ‘shrapnel’. As children we battled with our own injustices at schools with bullies and teachers who were tyrants in the classroom. At home we never had an inkling of when, where or with whom it would begin and who would be the next target. Every time I came home I really thought everything would be different. How do children grow when they lie down in shadows of darkness that aren’t playful but hateful and spite- ful effigies; ghosts that haunt them turning their dreams into nightmares? I remember birthday and Christmas presents. Special dates we went on. Then his name catches in my throat. Daddy. I remember when the darkness, the mania, the euphoria came with him. A determined turning point as cold as ice – mad- ness and fire. Turned in on its head. Once I wrote a suicide letter. Please forgive me daddy. I wasn’t sane, I wasn’t sober. I was ill. It was a chemical imbalance. I needed meds. They gave me life and the identity that I was urgently searching for. I was bored stiff of nagging, wining and tantrums. All of my Abigail George life I wanted to be like my mother. I also wanted to be a writ- er, free and educated. I had nightmares. I had dreams. I had goals I had to make decisions. This black demon, the mon- key on my back just wouldn’t let go. I became even clumsier in those first few months after my first diagnosis of clinical depression. I became inarticulate and needed prompting for my pleases and thank you’s. It was not an easy thing to do to face the fight of the illness head on. It took possession over everything in my life. My brother has become hard-bitten, hard baked. When we were younger it was easier somehow to exist but now that distance separates us; we all live in different cities it is harder to keep up the front; a beautiful, picture perfect illumination of the truth, fresh and new. Maybe it’s just work and stress. I try and not think of the embarrassing, the humiliating posi- tions I found myself in. Positions that made my own family and the people I came into contact with uncomfortable and forced them to keep me at arm’s length. Some days I know I won’t escape it but I laugh and smile and I pretend I’ll make a break for it. I gave up long ago thinking it was just a phase called growing up. Some days I’m petrified so I give in to it. I swallow my pride, forget the past and begin again. Writing like missing persons, missing children on the news tells us more than just a story. It gives us more than a show of tenderness if we let it cap- ture, captivates the essence and euphoria of your soul. It is Saturday evening. We were at the beachfront near the The walking wounded esplanade. I pretended to watch the beach while we were sit- ting in the car. My parents are laughing. Eating hot, greasy fish and chips wrapped in newspaper with lashings of brown vinegar. I wish this day could go on forever. I wish their laughter could go on forever. I tried not to reflect so much on my mother’s side of the family or my father’s. There was too much heartbreak war- fare there; too much ‘death by slow asphyxiation’. One night my aunt came home falling down drunk when she stayed with us. Desperate and contemplating suicide with foaming spit in the corners of her mouth. It was a horrific and terrify- ing sight to see that. She liked a drink or two and threw emo- tional tantrums and hysterics when she wanted attention like a sullen child. When she didn’t get her way and missed her children who were far away. She never tired of wearing the same clothes two days in a row. This Christmas my aunt and I trimmed the Xmas tree. I was happy; she was a little bit sad and homesick, black and blue. She cried wet, salty tears, burst into sobs and could not be consoled or counseled or given therapy or practical advice. There was no relevant explanation given or anything mis- construed. My aunt was just as damaged, mortally wounded in a way that we were. It felt familiar to me; this arena. Her aura gave off these vi- brations if you believe in things like that. It was simply noth- ing new to me. But my sister was not so kind. She was a fu- rious beast whenever she was in close proximity to my aunt. I thought that she of all people would understand and try to make sense of why my aunt could act so irrationally and then Abigail George be so charismatic, warm and sweet. A unique. He sounded more like himself this evening on the tele- phone. I smiled, laughed and teased him about his posh ac- cent and education. I missed him like crazy, though didn’t really tell him that in so many words and we spoke about books, what he was reading and how I was wasting his pre- cious airtime. His sadness and depression seeped into my own. While I take a bath there is a trail of ants on the rim march- ing to the beat and the rhythm of Mother Nature’s own drum. The light bulb is a pale balloon against the wall. I am think- ing wicked thoughts. I just can’t help myself but I always take it back. I think about my baby sister and I just can’t figure her out and why she seems to sometimes hate me so much. At these times I wish I could binge on junk food, a birthday cake laced with chocolate. I wish I could light incense, meditate and forget, push past, fast forward my response to all my hurt and regret. Remem- ber her floating on air, so elegant and beautiful. A winter guest in a world, a universe, on a planet, in a Johannesburg all white almost overnight. She is are exceptional, talented, a joy to be around with, bliss and a delight. But what stops us from getting closer. Is it the illness; my character or my personality? Here is a hug and a kiss, wet, white, salty tears at the ter- minal. Two strangers unbeknownst to me say goodbye at the airport. They rub their fingertips together; leaving an invisi- ble motif of a handprint against each other’s cheek. I’ve come The walking wounded to say goodbye to my sister at the airport for the umpteenth time but that is not how we say goodbye. We stand as far away from each other as humanly possible, deride all human contact and just hug briefly before she completely disappears from sight amongst the other passengers taking up space in the lounge. She is reminding me more and more of my mother everyday. It’s not her fault. It’s not anybody’s fault. It came from childhood. The end Abigail George An Ovi Magazine Books Publication 2022 Ovi Project Publication - All material is copyright of the Ovi magazine & the writer C Ovi books are available in Ovi magazine pages and they are for free. If somebody tries to sell you an Ovi book please contact us immediately. For details, contact: submissions@ovimagazine.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the writer or the above publisher of this book. The walking wounded The walking wounded Abigail George March 2022 Ovi magazine Design: Thanos Abigail George AbigAil george “The fIve of us carrIed our oWn hurTs, hearTaches, sadness, Inner TurMoIl and hearTbreaks In secrecy. MoTher, faTher, broTher and TWo sIsTers. WhaT Were We so afraId of, I screaMed InsIde My head.” A short story w alking The wounded Abigail George studied film and television production for a short while, which was followed by a brief stint as a trainee at a production house. She is a writer and poet. She has lived in Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth but she is currently living in Port Elizabeth. She has had poetry published in print and online. She has had short fiction published online. In 2005 and 2008 she was awarded grants from the National Arts Council in Johannesburg. She is not purely devoted to poetry but to pursuing writing fulltime. Storytelling for her has always been a phenomenal way of communicating and making a connection with other people.