The Drying Rooms - Chapter Ten

The Catastrophic Bed Wetting Episode

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I still have that baby crocodile handbag. The cheetah skin rug is long gone.

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Listen to the audio version of Chapter Ten here

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That memory scrap again.

That moment she became Cruel Matron’s opponent.

They are standing in the corridor.

Ripped from their beds.

Under the bright striplight.

In silence.

Cruel Matron patrolling the line.

“I said, who was talking?”

Cruel Matron’s cold voice.

Six girls saying nothing.

Under the bright striplight.

Silence.

The waiting. The shivering.

“I was.”

It wasn’t her, but she is flooded with anger. She hates Cruel Matron’s power. She suddenly boils up at the injustice of it.

“It was me.” She looks straight into Cruel Matron’s eyes. Defiant.

She’s sure this happened. Isn’t she? Or has writing the children’s novel Maudie got her confused? But this is one of those hard pebble memories. This is her boarding school human rights anecdote, told many years before embarking on Maudie, many years before peeling away the artifice insulating her split self, many years before she really started to understand what the fuck was going on inside her.

Telling the story, pouring herself another glass of wine, casually signalling her politics, “I hated injustice, even then,” before adding a nod to her bravery, “I was a little activist.”

In Maudie, when Maudie bravely takes the flak for talking, two or three other voices follow her lead:

“So was I.”

“And me.”

“I was talking too.”

She thinks this happened in real life as well. Before the kale field dorm. When she was still in the dorm with her own age group. Her close friends. Her sisters-in-arms. But it’s one of those elusive gossamer wisps, which is why she can play with it in Maudie, grab hold of it, breath a story into it that coheres.

But whether it was one or a group of children who owned up, the punishment certainly happened. The punishment was Sitting Out.

Why that gentle tug? I’d forgotten about you. Have you been here all the time? No, we’re not going to the drying rooms. Let’s just stick to the lesser Sitting Out places for now:  the spot on the floor outside Cruel Matron’s sitting room or in the windowless tuck-cupboard room – the spaces that are still near the dorms, where there is the slight comfort of dozens of nearby girls, breathing in their beds.

Can you see the girl in pyjamas sitting outside Cruel Matron’s sitting room? The one with short, brown curly hair. Hugging her knees to keep warm. That’s my friend. And that girl in the nightie with straight fair hair sitting cross legged at the end of the corridor – she’s my friend too. Both these friends have kind parents. I’ve stayed in their real homes because my home is too far away for half terms. Homes that smell of homes in England: cosy sofas and cooking. I slept in my friends’ real bedrooms. I once opened a kitchen door and stepped into a frosty back garden, mist still clinging to shrubs and a washing line, the sweet cold air on my face.

Come, take my hand, let’s go into the windowless tuck cupboard space. That’s where I’m Sitting Out. It’s warmer in here. I am leaning against the tuck cupboard, shifting position on the hard floor, fidgety with tiredness.

But I’ll get over it, don’t worry. It will pass.  You are worrying for me, little one. Don’t. There’s no need. I’m learning to handle this. How long will she leave me here? I don’t know. Two hours maybe. Or three – or she might just forget to collect me. She does that. But if I can go to the loo, that would be a bonus. And if not, well, the night will pass – and at least there’s a rubber sheet on my bed.

There certainly wasn’t a rubber sheet on the night of the catastrophic bed wetting episode, in the dorm overlooking the kale field.

That memory is seared. A scar deep in dark time.

She wakes up to the sound of dripping. This is a jolt of helpless horror.

Her pee has gone straight through the lumpy horsehair mattress and is dripping on to the little blue suitcase stored under her bed. The blue suitcase containing her baby crocodile handbag and the baby cheetah skin rug. The blue suitcase with the soft top. In the middle it sags slightly – the sag now contains a little pool of piss.

And the only thing she has to wipe it up with is her baby cheetah skin rug.

That rug! Helplessly splayed out. Its tiny head, its tiny teeth. She can feel her hand moving back and forth across its pale spotted fur — shiny smooth in one direction, ruffling against the grain in the other. She can smell the animalness still lingering in its thin pale hide. And that night, its fur soaked with urine, that rug came to the rescue.

What happened to it? What did she do with it after she had wiped herself dry? Stuffed it back, panicking, into her blue suitcase maybe? The fur now in stiff piss-dried clumps. 

And there is a conflation with that catastrophic forever helpless night. Somehow it is connected to lying on her back on the dorm floor and …

No, darling, stay away, this is not in Maudie. Please leave and close the door; this is not for you. I don’t want you to see this. This is not in Maudie!

Was it a punishment, or just a dark, naughty game? Did they take it in turns or was it just her on the floor? And was she coercively controlled? No. She was in edgy awe of them. But not controlled. Not by vulnerable children, like her. Maybe, yes, by Cruel Matron. Coercive control. Words of Now not Then —now she understands it well, along with so many of the other phrases in today’s Mental Health lexicon: attachment theory; dissociative amnesia; separation anxiety.

This is the image.

She is lying on her back on the dorm floor. The other girls have queued up at her feet in their nighties. One by one, they step over her. She can feel their nighties enclosing her face like warm musty tents. The game was that she looked straight up at their ten-year-old — the word we used then was: slits.

She has convinced herself it was a game; a deeply naughty game. Older peer pressure, maybe – but not peer punishment for wetting the bed.

No. Really?

Yes. Really.

A conversation between self and self is muscling its way in …

—There’s something else, isn’t there?

—Yes, but it’s complicated.

—This whole business is complicated.

—I know. OK. There is another conflation. The lying on the floor thing is attaching itself both to the catastrophic bed wetting episode and what I can only describe as a collective dorm crush for my older brother.

—Now you’re talking.

— He had visited the school, remember?  With a friend. Both of them were cool. Kings of cool. But why? Why did they come from their traditional, abusive boarding school to visit my progressive supposedly-not-abusive school?

—It doesn’t matter. Get on with it.

—Well, actually it does matter, because I want to establish I’m not making it up.

—You know you’re not making it up. Not the essence of it. What’s the problem?

—I feel somehow disloyal. To my brother — and to those girls. I was afraid of them, yes, but they were also my friends. I looked up to them.

—Your brother’s dead and the girls are old women now, like you. They’ll understand, or they won’t care, and don’t be so narcissistic, they’re not thinking about you, not like you are thinking about you – obsessively.

—Yes, all right! I know this. But it’s weird, isn’t it? Did we really play a sexualised game round the fantasy the other girls had about my older brother? Because the thing is …the thing is …

—Spit it out.

—I remember being thrilled that I had somehow shot up in status. I’d made it! Full club membership! I was special. I was the owner of a trump card in the dorm and I was milking it. The crush on my brother … and … the thing is

—What?

— [whispering] I think that dark game might have been part of it.

—Do you remember older brother’s disparaging remark about Cruel Matron?

—Yes! I do. It was delicious.

—Utterly delicious.

—Can you remember what he said?

—Yes. I can. He said: who was that little old woman chewing gum?

—Yes. That was it. Who was that little old woman chewing  gum!

My brother’s remark. Throw away. Crashing straight through Cruel Matron’s force field! Not even really noticing Cruel Matron. It was liberation day. It was hysterical. It was rolling on the floor of the dorm, repeating over and over, ramping up the giggle-ache:  Who was that little old woman chewing gum! But most important, my cool, good looking, insouciant brother had made me popular in the dorm.

The funny thing is that although his line about Cruel Matron has stuck in my head, I have no memory of her actually chewing gum. I can’t imagine Cruel Matron ever chewing gum. It is an image that is only attached to the memory of my brother’s visit conflating with that dark, Lord of the Flies game and the catastrophic bed wetting episode.