Natalie Lucas - Sixteen, Sixty-One

You probably want to slap me right now. I would. I mean, there are starving kids in Africa and I’m complaining that I have no friends! Not really comparable, I know. My mum says I’m self-indulgent. She cries a lot of the time too, though. I just have issues, you could call it paranoia (is it ‘io’?). I mean, I always find I don’t trust people. Why should I? I don’t trust myself even. I’m two-faced and I lie, so how can I expect all the other girls not to be bitching behind my back? I can’t stand myself. I cringe as I say things and I hate being shy. I hate the way I go red and my eyes fill up with water at the slightest things. I hate biting my nails, I hate how people intimidate me just because they don’t hate themselves. I don’t hate the way I look all the time, but I’m forever wishing I was someone else.

*

By the time Matthew got his hands on my diary, there were many pages of similar complaints about my mother, school, nobody understanding me and the black bags under my eyes. But there were a couple of other things that made me hesitate when he gently asked to read my thoughts.

‘I want to know you inside out.’

‘I know you’re writing it because you want to be read, so why not let me?’

‘It would be the most intimate act imaginable.’

Firstly, of course, I worried because by this time he featured quite extensively. There was probably nothing in there I wouldn’t say to his face given we’d developed such an open form of conversation, but still, what would it be like to have him see things like this in ink:

14/08/00

The only Uncle I have is Matthew, who is four times my age. It scares me because I’ve become quite dependent on him but he’s going to leave me. Be it death or moving to Bournemouth like Annabelle’s always talking about or me going off to university, he’s not always going to be here and that makes me want to weep.

22/08/00

Of course, I wouldn’t go there. Yuk. I can’t believe my mind just came up with that. He’s just my best friend and I’m looking for a father figure. It must be all those French films we’re watching.

29/08/00

I can’t help it. I was in the chemist’s the other day and the woman in front looked ancient. She had a prescription three pages long. I looked over her shoulder and read her date of birth. 1926. She was 74. All I could think was that, when I’m thirty, that’ll be Matthew. He’ll turn seventy the same year I’m twenty-six.

The second thing that I worried would set my diary apart from any other sixteen-year-old’s Matthew happened to read was the confession that had made one of my ex-boyfriends, Todd, exclaim, ‘Oh God, you’re just confused. Every girl I’ve ever met says that. Get over it, you’re not a lesbian!’ I didn’t know if I was a lesbian or not, but after the incident with Todd I stopped admitting seriously to friends that I thought I might like girls. I did, however, scrawl lines and lines about my concerns and ventured tentative explorations behind the mask of alcohol.

22/03/00

I figured out why I’m writing a diary. It’s because I watched Girl, Interrupted (my favourite film, along with American Beauty and The Virgin Suicides ) and she writes a diary in that. I guess I thought it might help me figure out some of my feelings. Watching that film again was really scary. It’s about a girl with Borderline Personality Disorder and the scary bit is I could relate to everything she said: all about not fitting in, not being listened to, not being able to just accept life and finding it easier to live in a fantasy land. The only thing I didn’t really relate to was the whole promiscuous thing – still being a virgin and all. But even that’s quite shady because I think that if I had the confidence, I may be promiscuous. I keep thinking about shagging some random girl. I don’t even know how it would work but I look at Jenna and Claire and Becky in class and I just want to press my lips onto theirs. Sometimes I worry they can see my thoughts, so I tell them I was thinking about Juan, this fit new Spanish guy in my tutor group. But, truth is, I’m far more interested in the lesbian thing. I heard some girls in the year below got really drunk last Saturday and all took each other’s tops off and had an orgy. All the girls in the toilets squealed with horror and said to keep away from them in PE in case they perved on us, but I just wanted to ask who they were and how I could make friends. Am I a freak?

*

Matthew had asked me ages ago whether I kept a diary and what security measures I had to prevent my brother and parents from reading it. He’d also asked in a teasing tone what secrets I recorded there and whether I kept secrets from him. For a few weeks I’d been entertaining the idea of letting him see it, of allowing another person to read me. I’d read and reread my own hand, wondering what Matthew might make of it: would he be shocked by my curiosities about my sexuality? Would he laugh at my immaturity? Would he think I was a bad daughter because I wrote angrily about my mother? Would he realise I was a loser with no friends at school and not want to spend time with me any more? Would he be offended by my thoughts about him? Would he still like me?

Eventually these doubts were outweighed by the heavy desire to be known: for a single person in the world to understand all that was in my head and help me work it out. One Sunday, after we’d had tea and chatted about Emily Dickinson, I removed the tatty book from my backpack and, with a trembling hand, offered it to Matthew. I paced miserably home and woke a dozen times in the night wondering if I had an email from him.

The next day, Matthew hung my diary from our doorknob in a plastic Safeway’s bag, along with two other items. The first was a new, spiral-bound, orange-flowered notebook; the second, a palm-sized engraved metal shape that Google later informed me was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for immortality. My immediate concern, though, was the printed page wrapped around the object:

Extract from The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler

The ordinary mortal in our urban civilisation moves virtually all his life on the Trivial Plane.

You are not ordinary, Natalie.

I saw Matthew a few hours later and all seemed normal, but as he poured me a cup of tea he asked nonchalantly, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were wondering about such things?’

I looked at him blankly.

‘It’s perfectly natural. In fact, it’s essential for Uncles to be open to love in any possible form. Most people go through their lives too afraid to admit their desires; they lock them up and only let out what their mummies say is okay, then end up in dead-end marriages having sex twice a year and finding their wives have been having an affair with the gardener.’

I giggled at his wild, angry gesticulations.

‘Your friends at school are just threatened by your insight. They probably go home and masturbate over you, wishing they had the guts to follow through.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I smiled. ‘But is it okay then? Is it normal?’

‘Why on earth would you want to be normal?’ he chided. ‘But of course it’s okay for you, it’s what you feel. It’s exciting.’

There wasn’t a day that innocence turned to deception and friendship to seduction. The declarations of love and the poetry we were reading lent themselves to hypothetical discussions about erotic possibilities, but they began in the abstract.

‘If society is so wrong that it forbids a perfectly healthy friendship between an old man and a young girl,’ I’d ask, ‘how can we be sure that everything else it deems “wrong” isn’t just as natural?’