Power cut

POWER CUT

Alice: “Things can seem to mean something they're not. People form opinions on mistaken assumptions and the secret is your own point of view. Yet you are crushed by the guilt of the point of view attributed to you, however wrongly. Crushed by the demands and expectations this raises and which, wrongly, you consider as your responsibility. Imagine a situation in which you are consistently wrong footed by someone powerful, someone who can hurt you and whom you must believe and obey. Imagine that if you spoke your secret and family would burst into smithereens and the explosion destroy you. It's not any one thing, it's the whole outlook such a situation generates and such situations, like oppressive dictatorships, thrive and depend on the secret being kept. And, as in an oppressive regime, it can be far too dangerous to speak out. So you're happy with anything that appeases your persecutors for a moment, even if you've guiltily seen they've got it wrong again. Your life depends on what you won't admit, even to yourself.”

Alice has been sitting on the settee next to Cathy, they've been drinking coffee together and looking at the lights of the city beyond Cathy's uncurtained front window.

Cathy: “That would set you apart from other people, feeling rebellious and angry inside but frightened to show it? Or totally in the wrong if you did?”

Cathy adjusts herself to this disclosure, thinking all families have hothouse secrets and dynamics which it is taboo to draw attention to, in Alice's case it sounds as if the taboo was murderously backed up and protected, everything Cathy has heard about Alice's family has led her to think it was more than usually hermetically sealed and shut off from other people. With no healthy outside influence and all powerful parents the whole set up would be unbelievably hothouse, boiling away without prospect of relief for any of its members.

Alice: “Entirely in the wrong for dissenting however slightly, then vilified outside the family for your “unnatural” attitudes towards your parents. With every act of injustice you try to tell yourself nothing has happened, you refuse to put the latest injury into words for yourself because everyone else believes the lying version, any rebellion is more and more unnatural and wrong an act, no one else can see rebellion is just and healthy, they see you as unhealthy and unjust when all you're doing is fighting for your integrity as your self and your own point of view. It's like being caught up in some dreadful Orwellian Newspeak where you haven't words to express yourself because anything you say comes out sounding like its opposite, you make all sorts of assumptions to adjust to injustice on a permanent basis and to this curious inversion of the meaning of words and the meaning of justly resenting an inimical status quo being converted into disease on your part not that of the body politic. If into this seething mess you introduce mortal illness and the shaking loose of every certainty - !”

suddenly the lights go out, both inside and beyond the front window. The city is plunged into darkness, the fridge had stopped humming, the central heating pump is still in the scared and listening darkness.

Alice: “Don't let go of my hand! It's dark.”

Cathy: “You aren't alone, I'm sitting next to you. It's only a temporary power cut, the lights'll come back on in a minute.

Alice: “Yes, and we're sitting comfortably so I'll tell you a story fittingly dark for this stuffy and meaningless darkness, this failure of civilisation over such a simple thing as light. I'll tell you what happens when love, however based on lies, goes the same way as the lights tonight. Once upon a time two students fell in love – this was towards the end of the Second World War – he was doing an RAF short course at Cambridge before joining up, she had been evacuated to Cambridge from Bedford College, London. They became engaged but he left to join the RAF and train as a navigator.”

Cathy: “Your parents?”

Alice: “My parents. My father served in Singapore then in Allied occupied Japan, my mother remained in Cambridge, gaining her degree then a Master's. When Dad was demobilised he read the Natural Sciences Tripos at Cambridge and gained his degree. They didn't marry until Dad was financially secure, they were going to build a post war world of love, children and happiness, although Dad had confessed that whilst serving abroad he'd had affairs. As a child I asked what adultery meant and suddenly realised I shouldn't have done, it made my mother very sad. She said one had to try to forgive it.”

Cathy: “How could you have known it was a difficult thing to ask? Why do you blame yourself, your mother had no right to make you feel to blame for a mere childish question?”

Alice: “You're right to pick me up on that. Childhood was a minefield, you could put your foot in it for the most innocent of questions and be made feel guilty for Mum's suffering. I did wrong when I tried to hug and comfort her when her friend killed herself, Mum angrily shrugged me off. I was eight at the time.”

Cathy: “You were the eldest child?”

Alice: “Yes, followed by two more sisters. You can imagine how that went down in those days when you proved yourself by giving birth to sons. I can't remember a time when I didn't feel wrong, and inferior, for being female. I was aware of the atmosphere when we met people in the street and that Mum apologised for having had daughters and deprecated herself, no, not herself, she deprecated us! You know Cathy, she did deprecate us, because I never felt wrong when I was with my Dad.

Cathy: “And then, at last, a boy?”

Alice: “Two boys. She told me she couldn't believe it when she found she was pregnant again with my younger brother. To make up for it she spoiled him rotten once he was born, Mum loved tiny babies because they were dependent and uncritical. Once you were bigger and formed opinions of your own she hated it and was angry with you. She specially hated it when I reached puberty, she came down on me like a ton of bricks and looking back on it I couldn't help growing up. She told me I'd hate her and be loud and horrid, when I wept, appalled, and protested, she was implacable, I was going to do this awful thing to her. I loved her, she was my Mum, she was caring and conscientious and did her duty although she hated it. She did her duty by all three girls though she loathed it and made us see she did, so as my sisters grew up we formed an unholy alliance against her, we resisted her domineering and her bullying methods and made jokes about it. She and Dad didn't have friends, we all stewed together and there was no court of appeal. What Mum said went and Dad always backed her up,you couldn't be in the right if you were one of the kids.”

Cathy: “Is this what you were saying earlier, about people with power acting on mistaken assumptions as if their mistakes were more real than the feelings or point of view of their, I was going to say victims, and yes, I do mean victims?”

Alice: “I suppose we were their victims, I suppose that's why it's always hurt me horribly that Dad says there's no worse hell than three teenage daughters in one house. We were the ones in hell and he refused to see it . It gets worse, Mum fell ill and was diagnosed with MS, we rejoiced that her dominion was broken then felt horribly guilty because she was ill and we were triumphantly healthy, and she made us feel the distinction, believe me, almost as if her illness was personally our fault. But without Mum Dad was a loose cannon, he wouldn't look after her or us, he looked abroad for love and met Janine, a fat divorcee on the lookout for a husband and neither she nor Dad cared that Mum was still alive. She moved into the house and they cavorted with all the licence they liked, to the extent of my younger brother having to chat very loudly to Mum to drown out the noises of those two having it off audibly upstairs. Janine was smug, bitchy to Mum and the sort of woman who puts younger women down, whilst flattering and indulging boys. My sisters and I hated her, Dad wouldn't see it nor would he see what Janine was like, getting her claws into him and her hands on Mum's kitchen things with Mum still sitting there slumped in her wheel chair. It made what we'd thought of as our security in love meaningless, Mum was set aside as rubbish, if women can be treated like that when they got old or crippled, what did the future hold for I and my sisters? Mum had a fall in the wash house and Janine, who was in the kitchen next door, ignored her crying for help and left her on the floor. My younger brother shouted at dad for this and Dad took his fists to him.”

Cathy: “The situation sounds intolerable. What happened next?”

Alice: “I couldn't bear to see Mum so ill treated, I was seriously scared Dad might kill her so one day we waited until he'd gone to work, removed Mum, both my brothers and all her furniture, and took them to live with me. My sisters had left home previously, they couldn't stand it.”

Cathy: “Hey, don't cry, I can feel you shaking.”

Alice: “I can't help it this is the hardest part. I couldn't cope, Mum was awkward on purpose and took swipes at my baby son whenever he went near her wheel chair, and no-one would help. Not the doctor, the district nurse, the social worker we eventually got though that was like getting blood out of a stone. And all she did was contain the situation not relieve it, she'd tell me to smile as if that would make the problem go away. I couldn't give Mum her meaning back and she seemed to expect that I should, she was resentful and uncooperative, too heavy for me to lift – we had to bathe her in my son's inflatable paddling pool – in the end I found her a place in a Cheshire Home and I've felt guilty for failing her ever since.”

Cathy: “Hey, have a tissue, there.”

Alice: “Thanks. There's no excuse. Dad had married Janine by this time, he visited Mum in the Home and that night she died of a heart attack, humiliated and in despair. How could I live when my own mother had gone into oblivion so sickeningly?”

Cathy: “You warned me what could happen when love went out as abruptly as the lights. “

Alice: “I can't live with the horror, no reconciliations are possible, nothing can be made right for Mum, she's dead as a doornail. You'd think telling you would be cathartic but it's not. I'm like the Ancient Mariner, under a compulsion to recite these horrors over and over again, as now I've clutched your hand to detain you and poured it all out. I can't stop myself thinking about it.

Cathy: “You seem to assume this story puts you beyond the help of God or humankind, that your grief and outrage are solely your own responsibility. But without other people you're locked in with the horrors, they can be reinterpreted, a new light can be shone into the dark past, suppose I say your mother died as she'd lived, spreading blame on her children for her illness and your Dad's disgraceful behaviour, dying was ducking out leaving the whole burden of the mess on your shoulders – okay she didn't die deliberately, the manner of her dying was down to her though - ?

Alice stirs in the darkness, having seen her story as a confession of sin. Cathy has determinedly asserted that her family dynamic was destructive and that Alice's mother's death was part and parcel of how she'd lived, but Alice thinks Cathy doesn't understand how she craves forgiveness and absolution, yet can't believe in God. Different lights on her story, and the power of her story to upset her and make her ill, churn inside Alice as the darkness conceals her from Cathy.

Cathy: “You think your mother's death was your fault, how could you redeem your mother with your love when she was so obstinately set on clinging to her version of the family, and refusing to see the possibility of doing things differently once she was rescued from the intolerable home situation? How could you be responsible for her unchanging point of view, you did enough by offering her another home, she was intelligent, she refused to adapt and change! Jesus had twelve mates to give him love and support, you try to redeem the world with none and without outside help, you explain the state of sin of the entire universe, as your fault – solipsist! As if, if you were killed, every evil would come right and be redeemed... “

As suddenly as they went out, the lights come back on. Alice's eyes are wet and her countenance distorted because this sudden illumination seems to emphasise Cathy's last point. If Alice was killed, or killed herself, the evil would be redeemed, it has the force of a revealed truth. There is the yellow lamp light, a quick glance shows Cathy Alice is in a crisis between this revealed truth of death as expiation, and her own explanation of the innate destructiveness of both Alice's parents and that that was not Alice's fault. She tries to help by pointing at the uncurtained window to show Alice that light has only been restored to this section of the city so far, there is more to be revealed, she tells Alice, whole sections are still in impenetrable darkness, don't jump to premature and half revealed conclusions. Healing might lie out there unlit as yet, wait and see. Cathy could kick herself or Alice, then quickly thinks, the possibility of suicide was there all the time, all she has done is bring the ever present danger into the light of the yellow lamp, now she knows what's what she has the power to act, if she has the strength, to save Alice from herself.