I dreamed that I was not
alone. I dreamed that I was held close by another person who didn't
want me for my body, didn't want anything from me,
just wanted to hold me close and was able to love me for myself,
without any demand that I love them back, without any need for
whatever it was that I possessed, and without any judgement of me.
This person didn't bother about my name or where I came from, didn't
regard me as an object, and didn't blame me for anything that I had
done, or demean because of anything that others had done to me. It
was so new a feeling, to be held without having to give, to be simple
accepted as myself, without my asking, to be comforted without any
pressure, any requirement at all. It was an unconditional love, of a
kind that I had never experienced before, so strong and so selfless,
so complete and so enduring, that I opened my heart to this person
and took them into me. No words were ever exchanged, no names, no
pack drill. I was given no orders, no instructions, no direction.
Just an all-pervading love that suffused my whole being and
invigorated me. I felt as if I had been re-born.
I
did not consider this dream to be a religious experience; my parents,
although they both came from families with long histories of
Christian belief and
tradition, had never opened any doors for me. Children of the 60s
they had eschewed conventional religious life and had searched for
Truth and Enlightenment in the East. they had immersed themselves in
Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism. For my 10th birthday I was given
two books: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
and The Sound of One Hand Clapping.
What a 10-year-old was supposed to make of them was never made clear
to me, and I can honestly say I made it to about page 10 in each of
them. Nothing remains except my love for riding on a motorbike, with
the wind whipping my hair out – no crash helmet for most of my life
– and seeing the road unwind like a reel of cine-film rolling
around and often over hills, sometimes straight as a ruler, then
whipping and twisting so that your bearings fall away and the only
thing certain is the seat of the bike and the driver whose body you
are clamped to. And for my 11th birthday, the last that I spent
partly at home, before I was plunged straight into Dante's Inferno
and from which I would not
emerge for more than 4 years, I was given some artefacts from the
Ba'hai Faith which I left behind together with my
grandmother's locket which I had kept safe in my bedroom since I was
5 and had been a personal gift from the old lady whose stories about
the seedier side of Edinburgh I had consumed voraciously for much of
my early childhood. The fact is, I had been closer to my Grannie
Dumbiedykes than I ever felt to my parents.
And Stacey was still a thorn
in my flesh, the cuckoo who had been planted in my nest to displace
me as my mother's only child and it would be at least 10 years and
probably closer to 15 before any true acceptance would replace the
bitter bile of sibling rivalry – ha! sibling hate, more like.
I
don't claim some kind of revelation, anything like Saul the Tax
Collector had which turned him into Saint Paul, Collector of Souls! I
wasn't on the road to Damascus – I was in a damp and mildewed flat
in Maryhill, not particularly
clean and tidy (that's both me and the flat) and reeking of sex,
having been the central recipient in a Bukkake Party given by a
delighted father as reward for his son passing his Finals and now
entitled to be called Doctor. And fifteen guys had stood around me,
jerking off and squirting their spunk all over me – especially my
face and hair; and this was after and before
various permutations had
shagged me, two or three at a time. By the time I got back to the
little flat I shared with three other girls, I was so drained and
bruised that I just crawled into my damp bed and fell headlong into a
black hole: actually it felt exactly like something out of an old
film noir in which a
silhouette of the heroine is shown spiralling into a well, I'm pretty
certain I was still 12 at the time, not even officially a Teenager;
just a cash cow for my owner who ran this little string
of cheap whores cheaply enough to make a good living out of us –
and he probably had more identical flats with more identical child
brides for hire, by the hour or by special arrangement.
So
it was more like the sleep of the dead until the dream started, until
I felt myself wrapped in a protective blanket of love – not sex,
LOVE! And I surrendered myself to it, willingly, hopefully, totally,
although I had no idea what it was. It seemed to surround and fill
me, at one and the same time all-knowing and not-caring: not caring
who I was and what I did and what was done to me; this was the first
time in my life – well from the time I became aware of the world
around me – that I had been held and sheltered and enfolded so
completely. And for the first time in a long while, I felt turly safe
and protected. I didn't know if I was awake or dreaming, alive or
dead, and I honestly didn't care. The only thing I wanted was never
to have to wake up and open my eyes and find myself in that damp bed
in that damp and stinking hole of a flat and once again the property
of my owner, the man who had bought me like a bag of groceries –
and probably for not much more than that – and who milked my body
for every penny it could earn. We never got to keep any of the money,
we got fed minimum wage but not in cash, just basic food and drink
and enough drugs to keep us able to work the streets and the parties
and the specials; Cindy, Candy, Cody and Cassie – the names the man
had given us and we answered to, having all but forgotten our true
names, because what did they count for? I'll tell you what: Nothing!
I was Cindy – probably the
umpteenth Cindy in his string, for all I knew there were likely
Cindys, Candys, Codys and Cassies in every flat the man owned. They
could have been numbers tattooed on our wrists for all the difference
it would have made. We did what we were told, with whoever we were
told to do it for; we asked no questions – of the man. of the
punters or of each other. You quickly learn that it's too dangerous
to ask questions. You just open your eyes in the morning, or the
afternoon, or whenever you need more dope, and carry on as before.
Days, weeks, months – who's counting? It wouldn't have made any
difference. There were no set working hours, we worked when and where
we were told. No days off, we worked every day and night. And the
only thing we had to look forward to was enough dope to get us to
sleep and enough dope to keep us awake and earning.
I
couldn't tell you how many men had me – I didn't care. I was
nothing to them and nothing to myself. All I wanted was to close my
eyes and never open them again. Actually that's not true. All I
really wanted was
enough dope to deaden my senses and keep me that way, so I wouldn't
feel the men on top of me and inside me. They treated me like a doll,
well I wished I was a doll and they could do whatever they wanted
without me knowing or caring or feeling them. Because I knew, sure as
Hell, that I didn't
have the courage to take that step and kill myself.
And yet, and yet.
As I felt my entire being
wrapped in that soft and supportive embrace, I wondered if this was
what it would feel like to be dead. I had never listened to my
parents when they spoke about their religious searchings, so I didn't
know what they knew about After Death, or probably After Life! I just
thought of it as a big nothing. Total shut-down. Like when you switch
all the lights off and are left in absolute darkness. But their was
something different now, filling my head with light. Not blinding,
dazzling light, like when the man shines his torch in your eyes and
tells you to shift your arse, he's got paying customers waiting. Not
that kind of light that makes your brain ache so much you want to
scream – and sometimes do, which just gets a slap on the head or a
kick on your legs, and more orders, get up, get dressed, get fucked
and earn him his money.
No,
this was a warm light, more yellow than anything, and the softness of
the light and the softness of whatever it was that surrounded me,
made me feel happier than I ever remembered. I never heard any words,
but I felt thoughts inside my head – as if someone was
communicating with me without speaking, or maybe it was all my
imagination, but at times it felt like a conversation, between
something in me and something outside. And yet none of it was in
words that I could make out. I'm not very metaphysical, much more
existential, but it reminded me of the way a mother instinctively
knows what her baby needs – now, how the fuck would I, at still
only twelve, know about what
being a mother entails? Yet
it was like being cradled by a mother – not my real mother, that's
for sure – but a mother with an intense closeness to and knowledge
of her baby; and I was that baby, or more to the point, that baby was
inside me, I can't explain it any clearer. My body was inhabited by
this mother's baby. It filled my mind, felt my pain, I suppose I'm
talking about my Soul or Spirit or whatever consciousness is. I don't
think I'd ever thought about it before, about having a Soul that was
more real than my body. But it melted away all my fears and pains,
and I surrendered myself to it – without really understanding what
it was – surrendered
completely and absolutely. But I had no idea what to do about it!
