In Defence of the Act, page 1
Effie Black is a London based writer with a background in science. She enjoys writing from a queer perspective and she likes bringing a spot of science into her fiction too. Effie’s short stories have appeared in Litro and the époque press é-zine.
In Defence of the Act is Effie’s debut novel.
Published by époque press in 2023
www.epoquepress.com
Copyright © Effie Black 2023
All rights reserved.
The right of Effie Black to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Typeset in Paralucent Light/Light Italic & Citrus Gothic Shadow Italic.
Typesetting & cover design by Ten Storeys®
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-7391881-4-6 (Paperback Edition)
ISBN 978-1-7391881-5-3 (Electronic Edition)
The blonde woman, who I’m pretty sure said her name is Amy but who doesn’t really look like an Amy, more like an Anne, peers out at us in our rows.
‘What does resilience mean to you?’ she says.
No one speaks. She starts slowly pacing the width of the room, back and forth.
‘Feel free to shout out.’ Everyone feels free. No one shouts out.
‘Anyone?’
No one.
Amy-Anne begins looking a little desperate. She tries making eye contact with each and every one of us in turn to guilt us into speech. When she gets to me, I avoid her gaze.
‘What do we mean when we say resilience?’ Her voice has started to quiver, but she maintains her fixed smile.
Dread builds in my stomach. Please will someone answer her? Am I going to have to answer her? I really would rather not. But of course, like everyone else in this room, I do know the answer. Why won’t someone just tell Amy-Anne what resilience means?
Finally, a quiet voice from behind me bleats something. Amy-Anne’s relief is palpable.
‘What was that?’ she asks eagerly.
‘Umm, I think resilience is all about being strong in tough times. Bouncing back. Sort of thing.’ The voice repeats, louder now.
I look back to see the speaker is a sheepish middle-aged woman, clearly a nicer woman than I, surely moved to answer out of sympathy. I try to thank her with my eyes, but I don’t really know how to do that, so I probably fail.
‘Bouncing back? Yes, lovely, lovely.’ Amy-Anne replies, and then proceeds to offer various definitions of resilience, outlining what dictionaries, psychologists, and Buddhist monks have to say on the matter. She provides not one but two quotes from retired US basketball sensation Michael Jordan. Amy-Anne doesn’t look like a basketball fan. Did she think this small room of early-career British academics would be basketball fans? Although I can only authoritatively speak for myself, I suspect she may have misjudged us. In fairness though, it does seem Mr Jordan has some sensible ideas; failure being the key to success, his missed shots and lost games spurring him on to work harder, etc. etc. etc.
Now Amy-Anne wants to share her absolute favourite definition. To do this she says she must show us an animated video, and requests that we please give her a moment to set it up. She fiddles with her laptop for a bit. The fiddling is normal fiddling at first; it always takes time to pull up a video. But it’s clear to everyone when after a few moments the fiddling switches from normal fiddling to panicked fiddling. The embedded video isn’t working.
‘That’s ok. I’ll just go to the video directly on YouTube, this animation really is worth seeing,’ she assures us.
But YouTube isn’t loading because the laptop isn’t connected to the conference hotel’s Wi-Fi. We watch Amy-Anne try and fail to connect several times.
‘The guest login was working earlier,’ she tells us.
People are shifting in their seats. The nice middle-aged answering woman behind me is one of the many now letting out not-so-nice sighs. Quiet chatter begins at the back of the room and spreads forward. The quiet chatter grows to become simply chatter, and then starts to verge on rather loud chatter.
Eventually a technical person steps in to help. I feel relieved at first, but quickly realise this is far worse. With the technical expert now taking over the fiddling, Amy-Anne is left at a loose end, staring out at us, murmuring apologies and reassurances. Things have gone from boring to awkward. She makes a joke about how perfect it is that in this session about resilience her own resilience is being tested right in front of us. No one laughs. I feel sorry that no one laughs, even out of simple kindness. Yet I myself remain markedly not laughing. Something about Amy-Anne makes it difficult to be kind to her. I ponder how someone can possibly become a professional public speaker without being terribly good at public speaking. But then I remember I am a scientist who isn’t terribly good at science, so all things are possible.
Finally the tech hand gives a guilty shake of his head. No video today. Amy-Anne is in a tough spot, but teaching the course through example, she bounces back. She decides to simply tell us the story instead. She leans back on the desk at the front and begins. She stumbles with the tale. A lot. She has to re-start it a few times. I can’t be the only one in the room wondering how many times Amy-Anne’s actually watched the video she wanted so desperately to show us. She must have watched it at least once, of course. But maybe only once. Anyway, this is the gist. One day a daughter was complaining to her mother. She had so many troubles and they just kept on coming. It was making her too sad to function. There seemed nothing she could do, she was at her wit’s end. Her mother beckoned her into the kitchen and told her to watch as she put three saucepans of water on the stove until the water was boiling. In one she placed a carrot, in one an egg, and in one a coffee bean. Her daughter understandably didn’t know what the hell was going on. But after a while the mother asked her to take the carrot out of the water and tell her what she saw. What she saw was a boiled carrot. Then the daughter took out the egg and saw a boiled egg. Same with the coffee bean. The mother explained that the carrot, the egg and the coffee bean had all suffered the same adversity: the boiling water. The carrot had responded to this adversity by becoming soft and mushy. The struggle had transformed it from hard to fragile, anyone could smush it now. The egg responded by growing tough. It looked the same from the outside, but its heart had hardened to the world. But look at the little coffee bean! It too had entered the boiling water, yet it had come out unchanged. Not only that, the mother said, as she sipped the resulting coffee, the bean had changed the water.
The rest of the Honing your resilience session flies by in a blur of small group sharing, personal goal setting, and mindfulness training involving staring at and eating a single raisin for an inordinate amount of time, none of which leaves much of an impression on me. But I do emerge knowing three things:
Amy-Anne’s name is actually Annie. It said so on the final slide. It fits her perfectly.
I will never try to use a video in a presentation. Ever.
I’d love to be a coffee bean. But I’m a complete and utter egg.
What’s your first memory? Not one of those snippet memories; a flashing image, a déjà-vu type physical sensation, a snatched sentence. What’s your first full memory? One you recall from beginning to end? One you truly inhabit as a sentient being? One you can jump into at any point, fast forward and rewind, and play over and over in your head? Maybe I’ve told you this already, but here’s mine.
I’m four years old. My mother is pregnant with my younger brother. Pregnancy is making her tired and boring, and her growing stomach means I can’t sit on her lap anymore. Her exhaustion has reached such an extreme that on this particular Saturday morning she has entrusted me with a phenomenally important task. She has given in to my demands to be taken to the park, and as it will be my father who’ll drive us, she’s asked me to deliver a cup of tea to wake him up. Clearly my insistence that I’m old enough to help with childcare responsibilities when the new baby arrives has finally been taken on board. If I do this correctly, maybe my suggestion of not starting school in September will be considered more seriously. What a fantastic opportunity to prove my worth.
My mother hands me the mug of tea and her faith. It’s a large blue mug, and in retrospect I will think it’s been a little overfilled, given the context. I have no problem carrying it from the kitchen through the living room to the bottom of the stairs. It’s there that the issues begin. I’ve been holding my charge in two hands until now, clasping both hands around its body. Now I stand looking up at the more demanding terrain of the towering staircase. I slowly manoeuvre the mug, inching it around in my hands, until I’m able to grasp the handle with my right hand, and take the banister with my left. I confidently mount the first couple of steps without much thought. But a hot splash on my right foot halts my progress. The vessel is so large and full that I’m finding it difficult to keep it completely level with one hand. Only a small amount of tea has escaped so far, but I can’t continue like this.
I hold the mug before me at eye-level, taking each step slowly and steadily. Although it threatens to, I ensure no tea spills. And I make good progress, even if I do say so myself. Feeling confident now, I start imagining the smile on my dad’s face when he sees what I’ve achieved. If there’s one thing my dad loves, it’s tea, so I’m overjoyed to be the delivery girl.
Until another issue arises. The tea has now thoroughly warmed the thin-walled mug, and the mug has thoroughly warmed my cold chubby little left hand. My mum says if I want to warm my hands I need to put some bloody socks on. This doesn’t make much sense to me. But it seems holding a mug of tea also does the trick, and rather too well. The warming of my left hand was a nice sensation at first. But then it moved into uncomfortable, and now painful territory. I’m supporting the mug with as little of my hand as I can, just the fingertips, but even that is getting unsustainable. Hot needles are entering my fingers and my brain is clouding with panic. I stop again, ordering myself not to look back down the stairs, and I swiftly switch hands. My left hand now has some respite on the handle, and I carry on my journey.
I have to do the ol’ switcheroo a couple more times to save my fingers, but eventually I make it to the small landing at the top of the stairs. I rotate ninety degrees to the left without taking my eyes off the tea, ascend the final two steps to the main landing, and then rotate ninety degrees again. At the end of the landing is my dad’s room. The destination is in sight. I don’t yet know that it’s unusual for my mum and dad to have separate rooms. I’ll realise that when I start school, and I’ll quickly learn to keep quiet about it. As I walk towards my dad’s door, I allow myself to peek through the banister to my left and look down on the stairs I’ve scaled, feeling proud and dizzy at the same time.
When I reach my dad’s room I shift the mug to one hand, being extra mindful to hold it steady. This hurts my wrist a little, but it will only be temporary. Plus I hardly notice the pain. Now the worst of the journey is over, my intense concentration has been replaced by excited anticipation. My dad is going to be so surprised! I’ll knock and he’ll be annoyed because he’ll think it’s just Mum waking him up earlier than she’s supposed to, but it’ll actually be me: his favourite little girl bringing him his favourite thing in the world, tea. I can’t wait to see the smile on his face. I bet he’ll let me climb into bed while he yawns too loudly and drinks his tea, and maybe he’ll even tell me a story. I have to restrain myself from simply shouting out to him through the door. I feel like I’m going to burst.
I knock quietly at first as I don’t want to annoy him, and I listen. When there’s no response I knock louder, and then louder still. No reply. Although this dents my excitement somewhat, it doesn’t shock me. My dad is a heavy sleeper and he wears earplugs all of the time. I once heard his sister, my auntie, say the earplugs thing is incredibly antisocial, but he didn’t seem to hear her. Rather than shout and ruin the surprise, I decide to sneak in.
I enter the room, and there he is sleeping deeply, making a small snoring sound. I stand in front of him, proud and beaming, holding out my steaming offering. I say, ’wakey, wakey Dad, rise and shine!’ I say it louder. And then louder again. But he really must have his earplugs in tightly today because he doesn’t stir. I carefully place the mug on top of a low bookshelf. As I set it down a little tea drips over the edge and onto the wood. I check behind me to see if he’s woken and I’m relieved to note he hasn’t, and then I swiftly mop it up with my shirtsleeve. That dealt with, I return to my mission. I grab my dad’s arm and shake it. ‘Wakey wakey, rise and shine!’ Nothing. It occurs to me he might be pretending to sleep, waiting to make me jump when I least expect it. But something about his face tells me that’s probably not the case. I do the biting thing we do when I’m pretending I’m a wolf and I’m gnawing on his elbow. I bite him really rather hard. And then harder. So hard it makes my teeth hurt a bit. But that doesn’t rouse him either, and when I let go of his arm it drops like lead, hanging limply over the side of the bed.
Something is wrong. The tightly-coiled-spring inside my chest is still there, but it no longer feels like excitement. I have a desperate need for my dad to be awake right now. I put both hands on his chest and shake him. I shake him harder, with all my strength. I hit his stomach and I punch his arm and I eventually slap his face, but he doesn’t move. I try to shout to my mum but nothing comes out. I stand frozen, staring at my dad’s lifeless form, listening to his faint snores for what feels like forever. And then my mind finally kicks into action. I race back to the kitchen in a fraction of the time of my ascent, taking the stairs two at a time even though Mum says it’s dangerous. I tell Mum that Dad simply won’t wake up. He just won’t wake up. Though she dismisses me at first, telling me I better make him wake up if I want to go to the park because she certainly won’t be walking me all the way there in her state, she finally comprehends what it is I’m telling her, takes my panic seriously, and pushes past me, running up the stairs as best she can with her protruding stomach. I follow her but can’t keep up. When I get to the room I find her crying, screaming, staring at an empty pill bottle on the bookshelf, not far from where I laid the tea.
Things become broken in my memory after that. I can see the ambulance arriving, and I hear myself pleading to be allowed to travel in it with my parents. Funnily enough, I can’t recall whether I got my way, and it’s never occurred to me to ask, which isn’t too strange given I’ve hardly spoken to anyone about any aspect of that day since. Where did I go if I didn’t travel in the ambulance? I remember staying with my aunt for days afterwards, maybe weeks, and crying and crying and crying as she and my uncle tried to pretend everything was fine. But it wasn’t fine, I would tell them, because my daddy’s in the hospital, he’s sick. I don’t think I could’ve known what had transpired that day, I was only four after all. I just knew it was bad.
But at some point I suppose my maturing brain filled in the gaps. I eventually realised my dad had done this to himself. He had wanted to leave this world, a world containing me, my mum, my soon-to-be brother, and eventually, my sister too. And if it weren’t for me, he may well have succeeded.
I don’t know how to feel about that.
Thirty-one years later and I’m watching breakfast news. They’re covering a story about a man who killed himself in Newcastle yesterday morning. He burned himself to death in his outhouse. He woke up, doused the building and himself in petrol, and set himself alight. He left his seven-year-old twin girls sleeping in their room, but he attempted to take his wife and ten-year-old son with him. Covered in petrol, he fetched them from where they’d been watching television in the house, dragged them across the garden into the deathbed he’d made, and tried to make them lie in it with him. Luckily his wife was able to escape with the boy, although not without serious burns and damage to the child’s lungs.
Discussing this news item on the BBC breakfast sofa is a spokesperson for an anti-suicide charity. He is particularly worried about male suicides. He tells us that of the 5,965 people who killed themselves in the UK last year, 4,508 were men. He wants something to be done. Increase funding, increase awareness, start a conversation. He’s very passionate, this campaigner; men are dying. He has a serious slim face and a solemn voice and he’s dedicating his life to something he feels is a noble cause. Very commendable. Only I can’t help but think the charity has picked the wrong case to use as a platform for their message. The suicide victim in question attempted to burn his wife and ten-year-old son to death. Surely only suicide bombers and Americans who shoot up schools before topping themselves would be less sympathetic?
