20. Taking Up Space
“I was trying not to be the subject of someone else’s poetry and not to get killed; I was trying to find a poetics of my own, with no maps, no guides, not much to go on.” – Rebecca Solnit.
On 15 February 2003, a month before I turned twenty-three, I attended the anti-war march in London, in opposition to the invasion of Iraq. It was a bitterly cold day, and I recall the clouds feeling oppressively low and being a nicotine-tinged grey that suggested snow. That morning, in a share-house in West Hampstead, we made placards and drank mugs of instant coffee, passing around joints to take the edge off our excitement. My boyfriend had organised some anti-nuclear marches at uni, but I had never been to anything that promised to be so big. Crowds made me nervous, but this seemed greater than my fear. The immensity of the numbers occupying those familiar London streets and the feelings that drove them to be there were overwhelming. The images and atmosphere of that day will never leave me: the passion and power of the speeches we heard in Hyde Park, the unity of our steps and songs as we marched, the rare experience of being part of something more profound than our individual stories. And afterwards, as our flesh thawed in the warmth of a pub, of the connection forged between us. How could something so substantial and momentous, mirrored in more than 600 cities around the world, not have some impact on what was to happen next?
* * *
As a child growing up in village outside Cambridge, I was often late for school. I would run across the empty playing field, bag thumping against my back, and, not seeing a soul, wonder if everyone in the world had disappeared and I was all alone. When the sky was overcast, the air still and the roads empty, it would seem as if it were almost possible. Then at some point, my fear switched, turning itself inside out: the world is carrying on and I have no place in it. I have ceased to exist.
In those years after university, when I was struggling to locate a sense of belonging, I bore the dread of non-existence. An ever lurking presence that continues to haunt me to this day: on the days when I feel like my writing will only be read by those trusted few who love me; when I tell my kids that dinner is ready and no one comes to the table; in the husband who is so consumed by the lives of his patients that he often does not hear or see me; in the endless days of washing and cleaning and cooking for my family who take my servicing of their needs for granted. It is there when I wait for my takeaway flat white in the local cafe and eavesdrop on the conversations about busy work lives and travel plans and upcoming projects, and then leave feeling insignificant and invisible.
In Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, Recollections of My Non-Existence, she writes about her struggles as a young woman fighting to find a new way to live: “Femininity at its most brutally conventional is a perpetual disappearing act, an erasure and a silencing to make more room for men, one in which your existence is considered an aggression and your nonexistence a form of gracious compliance.”
Solnit is almost 20 years older than me, yet her experiences strongly resonate. Lately, the old anger that swirled inside me as a young woman has returned. It is always there, burning low, ready to rage at the slightest provocation. The gaslighting that is rife at every turn; the arrogance and assumption of authority; the endless injustices that remain the status quo. Perhaps, after a decade of baby fog, I have awoken again. Or possibly it is reading about the #MeToo movement, which has led me back to a place of anger and frustration and shame. Or is this a symptom of perimenopause, a second adolescence? Of course, it could be none of these. It could just be that, for women, the world is fucked, and that I’m still mad about it.
“Cities are not designed for women,” my friend Ingrid informed me after one of her architecture lectures, during our undergraduate years at Nottingham University. They are not safe places but dangerous landscapes that we must navigate. Dimly-lit underground carparks, shadowy doorways, secluded alleys, dark stairwells. Walk in the middle of the road, keep your keys between your fingers, don’t make eye contact, don’t stop if someone approaches you, pretend you’re on your phone, take the long route if it’s busier, let someone know where you are and when you’ll be back, always plan your journey home. With ceaseless vigilance and a bit of luck, you’ll avoid being beaten, raped, killed. I have lived in many cities in a state of nearly constant fear. One place in London necessitated a fifteen-minute walk from Euston Underground Station to my flat in Mornington Crescent, past a string of sex shops and strip clubs and sports bars. In the winter it was always dark, even if I came home straight from work. I tucked my long hair into the collar of my coat, clutched my phone in my hand, looked straight ahead, and did not glance at the men entering and exiting the establishments. I tried to disappear, to take up as little space as possible.
* * *
After university, everyone raved about my future. You’ll get a job, no problem, they assured me. I wanted to work in journalism or publishing or film production, but I had no experience or contacts. Ever present was the feeling that you were replaceable and indistinct from all the others lining up for work experience. Only the rich could afford to stay in unpaid placements that ran for months, and only the well-connected stood any chance of gaining employment. I had a huge directory called the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook that I slogged my way through with a highlighter, sending out hundreds of letters and CVs in the hope that someone might have an entry-level job for me. Almost none wrote back.
Still without employment and low on savings, I moved into a flat in West Hampstead, owned by a charity that a friend was working for. The flat was on the top floor of a grand, redbrick Victorian mansion. My room was tiny and freezing, with a dormer window you could peer through to look out across the chimney pots of the surrounding buildings. I loved it. The four of us shared books, smoked a lot of weed, and went to endless gigs in tiny clubs and scruffy backstreet pubs.
Eventually, miraculously, I was offered a job as an office manager/production assistant at an award-winning company that made documentaries and feature films. My life was finally on track.
The next year was marked by humiliation, abusive behaviour, and broken promises that decimated my confidence. One of the directors was an advocate for me, or at least claimed to be, although I never saw much evidence of it. He also leered at me, teased me about my boyfriend, flirted outrageously with me at office parties, and when I finally quit a year later, wrote me a reference so gushing my mum questioned whether we’d been having a relationship. He had a terrible temper and would rage and swear if something wasn’t going right; then when the problem was fixed, he’d revert to charm and lavish compliments. He was married with three kids, and yet despite this, despite his behaviour, I found him attractive – but only because he was an interesting and bold character who seemed to see the potential in me that no one else had. Perhaps this was true or perhaps I was just a pretty 23-year old that he enjoyed having under his control. Either way, none of his promises came to anything. I never went on a shoot, never worked as a researcher, and was humiliated in front of my friends when I was told I’d have a credit on a series I’d worked on, only to realise at the end of the program that my name did not appear. Yet again, I was rendered invisible. So great was my anger that I couldn’t look at him for a week. But I was too meek to tell him, too scared to lose my job, so I just cried in the office toilet. Perhaps this was all I was meant to be. I thought this suffering was par for the course: the culture of the industry. That was what the other women led me to believe. Just suck it up and try to keep them happy. Or perhaps you don’t have what it takes.
None of the women seemed happy, even the executive producers. I looked at them and their lives and thought, I do not want to be like you. They seemed to work twice as hard, deal with more shit, and grind themselves down to enable the men to shine. It was these larger-than-life, colourful characters, with their temper tantrums and fragile egos and tolerated eccentricities, who were the stars – realising their creative visions and reaping all the applause and awards while leaving behind a wake of destruction as they powered towards greatness. It seemed to me that all the men around me were following their creative callings with a confidence and certainty in their importance that eluded me. I was modest and humble and apologetic, begging for crumbs and having little success procuring even that. I didn’t want to spend my life as a support system for others. I wanted to make my own art.
* * *
If there was a soundtrack to that time, it would be Amy Winehouse’s album Frank. The people around me with knew her and she frequented the same North London pubs and clubs we went to. She was three years younger than me and yet she seemed far more womanly and worldly. There was something bold and substantial about her: her voice, her body, her personality, her sexuality, her artistry. The theatrical makeup and lip piercing that resembled a beauty spot, quivering above the corner of her mouth. The large gap teeth beneath the lacquered lips, sensually fluctuating between sulk, pout, sneer. Amy’s sound was uniquely her own, yet it was laced with undertones of familiarity, a melding of soul, rhythm, blues, and jazz. She was very different from me and yet she sang of things I longed to express: yearnings and anger, frustrations and disappointments. Her voice was a powerful, deep, and expressive contralto; it did not seem like it could belong to such a young woman, possessing as it did the pain and wisdom of several lifetimes of heartache. With humour and honesty, she sang about sex without being demure and diminutive, or seductive and coquettish. She was not seeking to please. I found her captivating, magnetic, shocking, at times repulsive. So transgressive was it for a woman to unashamedly occupy so much space.
A few years later, back in London, I would catch sight of a billboard of Amy Winehouse promoting her new album, Back to Black. I hardly recognised her. She seemed to have become a caricature of herself – the skinny legs of a prepubescent girl, wasted arms covered in tattoos, hair styled into a huge beehive, makeup even more dramatic. I was horrified by the transformation. The disappearing act had started. She was already a diminished force, reduced to being less than who she was, less than she had every right to be. By the age of 27, she was gone.
* * *
I moved out of the share-flat and into a grim ground-floor bedsit with a broken sash window, a noisy fridge that kept me awake, and a shower that required pound coins to work. I was lonely and deeply unhappy in my job, but I was writing a little, trying to reawaken some dormant creative impulse that studying English literature had stunted. I needed to re-learn how to write for pleasure, without the crippling critic whispering in my ear. I was too self-conscious, too uptight, too aware of fitting into some broader movement and being ground-breaking and intellectual. There was a lot that needed to be undone before I could find my voice.
When I was accepted onto the writing program at Edinburgh University, I felt like I had returned to myself. My mum, perhaps trying to do me a favour, had once warned that I was too materialistic and normal to be an artist, but she was wrong. When I write, I exist, making myself visible with each word I set down on the page or screen. Time and again, from the cusp of non-existence, I come back into being through this strange pursuit of making something from nothing.
* * *
I tried to find some photos from that time, but it was before Facebook, before iPhones, before we documented and shared every moment of our lives. Six shoeboxes later, I have nothing but some bad photos of boys bedecked in baggy jeans and fooling about on an underground platform, a band I can’t recall, and some drunken, shiny-faced girls with tangled hair and smudged eyeliner, huddled together to fit in the frame. I watch BBC footage of the march and half expect to locate my face amongst the masses, but of course, I don’t. And yet I know I was there, breathing the cold air, hoping to make a difference, taking up space.
Kim Aikman is a writer and postgraduate student, living in Walyalup with her husband and four children. She has completed residential fellowships at Varuna and KSP, and been selected for programs at the Faber Writing Academy, FAWWA, and Granta. Her writing has been published in Westerly, Verandah, and Meanjin Quarterly.