The Fat Lady Sings, page 1
Jacqueline Roy
* * *
THE FAT LADY SINGS
With a new introduction by Bernardine Evaristo
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Jacqueline Roy is a dual-heritage author, born in London to a black Jamaican father and white British mother. After a love of art and stories was passed down to her by her family, she became increasingly aware of the absence of black figures in the books she devoured, and this fuelled her desire to write. In her teenage years she spent time in a psychiatric hospital, where she wrote as much as possible to retain a sense of identity; her novel The Fat Lady Sings is inspired by this experience of institutionalization and the treatment of black people with regards to mental illness.
Roy rediscovered a love of learning in her thirties after undertaking a Bachelor’s in English and a Master’s in Postcolonial Literature. She then became a lecturer in English, specializing in Black Literature and Culture and Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she worked full time for many years, and was a tutor on The Manchester Writing School’s MA programme. She has written six books for children and edited her late father’s novel No Black Sparrows, published posthumously. A second novel for adults will be published in 2022. She now lives in Manchester.
In memory of Yasmin Kanji, with love
Introduction
Black Britain: Writing Back is a new series I’ve curated with my publisher, Hamish Hamilton, at Penguin Random House. Our ambition is to correct historic bias in British publishing and bring a wealth of lost writing back into circulation. While many of us continue to lobby for the publishing industry to become more inclusive and representative of our society, this project looks back to the past in order to resurrect texts that will help reconfigure black British literary history.
The books included in the series are my personal choices, determined by my literary values and how I perceive the cultural context and significance of the books. The series is not to be regarded as an attempt to be definitive or to create a canon. Canons are by their very nature hierarchical and have traditionally been constructed by the prevailing white orthodoxies of academia. Black British writers rarely appear on these reading lists, are rarely taught to new generations of readers and unless they become commercial successes, their legacy very quickly disappears.
My aim is to present a body of work illustrating a variety of preoccupations and genres that offer important and diverse black British perspectives. Good books withstand the test of time, even if they are of their time. I am very excited to introduce these books to new readers who will discover their riches.
The Fat Lady Sings plunges deep inside the hearts and minds of two vulnerable women who have been diagnosed with mental illness. It’s the kind of novel where the reader has to relinquish the expectation of a straightforward plot and succumb to the propulsion of its experimentalist, parallel narrative form.
The two women in question are Gloria and Merle, in their fifties and twenties respectively, who are both British with a Caribbean background. It’s the nineteen-nineties, they end up in beds next to each other in the ward of a mental hospital and while they get to know each other, we get to know them. Both of them are on medication that numbs their emotions and dulls their minds. We witness their stay in the hospital in real time, present tense, while their back stories emerge in fragments throughout the text. Each woman is afforded her own chapters, alternating, to narrate her story in the first person. We are also introduced to the voices Merle herself hears inside her head. These extra voices provide an externalized running commentary on who she is, what she is doing, what has happened to her, and they increasingly verbally harangue her with huge lashings of vitriolic acid. They tell her she can do nothing right and that everything about her is wrong. Merle is essentially drowning in self-hate. These auditory hallucinations are very real to her although her idea of reality and ours might not correspond.
Gloria’s narration is singular and intelligible. She’s something of a wisecracker and brings necessary levity to the proceedings. Her behaviour contravenes the rules of what is considered normal social behaviour, which is why she has been incarcerated. Whether or not a psychiatric ward is the best place for Gloria to be is up to the reader to decide. Notions of rationality and irrationality are always open to interpretation and challenge. What the novel does do is let us in on the causes and manifestations of the women’s mental health situations, and we see what happens to people when they find it hard to cope with personal tragedy and grief, when they experience social isolation and unequal relationships, and when past traumas resurface.
Although there are two black women at its core, the novel is not about race or racism, though there are cultural references that make it demographically specific, which is important. There certainly isn’t an overt message that they are treated differently on account of their identity, although the novel can be read as an indictment against an ineffective mental health system. The novel exposes the ways the system uses medication to suppress behavioural anomalies enough for them to be released, but the psychiatric care on offer fails to deliver enough useful support to meet the needs of patients grappling with profound issues. That said, there are serious issues in Britain around black people and the mental health system, with high rates of psychosis and detention relative to the size of the demographic. While this is rightly a work of fiction and not a report, it’s worth noting this wider context.
Published in 2000 by The Women’s Press, this novel passed me by at the time, and I only came across it while researching for this book series. I’m surprised that it didn’t come to my attention because I thought I was aware of all the novels being published in the nineties and noughties by black British women, my peers. As with so many books, it seems to have flown under the general radar of the literary world and received little critical attention. Mental health is a less taboo social conversation these days. Its stigma has been reduced and it is more readily and widely acknowledged. Twenty years ago, this was not the case, and I can imagine there would have been some discomfort with reading a novel so overtly and uncompromisingly about black women with mental health issues, and perhaps there was an assumption that it would be a challenging read, rather than enjoyable, surprising, original.
On several levels, this is a novel of daring – thematically, stylistically and, with a lesbian protagonist in one of the women, it breaks with the heteronormative convention of black British writing in the past and even today, with very few exceptions. The Threshing Floor (1986) by Barbara Burford was the first collection of short stories published by a black British woman, as far as I know. Its central, eponymous short story, which is actually long enough to be a novella, is also a lesbian story. I used to know Barbara, sadly deceased in 2010, in the nineteen-eighties, when we moved in the same artistic feminist circles. She was a generation older, and certainly much wiser and kinder than my hot-headed self. Originally a poet, The Threshing Floor, published by Sheba Feminist Press, was her only sole-authored book. I don’t know why she didn’t continue to publish because we had lost touch by the end of the eighties, but with so many of my earlier peers producing only one or two books, I am filled with sadness at the thought of all that unfulfilled and, if they did write but didn’t or couldn’t publish, unshared talent. Fourteen years later, in 1998, Jackie Kay, already well established as a poet and short-story writer, published her first, critically acclaimed novel, Trumpet (1998), spanning seventy years of the twentieth century, about the secret life of a woman who lives publicly as a man, and who is in a marriage with another woman.
White British women writers had long written unquestionably queer novels, from Radclyffe Hall’s classic The Well of Loneliness (1928) onwards. It should be no surprise that both Burford and Roy were published by women’s presses in the male-dominated industry of years ago. The Women’s Press also published Caeia March’s series of lesbian novels, including The Hide and Seek Files (1989), an intergenerational and interracial novel with a cross-dressing woman at the heart of it. Even today, there are not many no
Most of the black women’s novels of the nineties/noughties were bildungsromans. Along with Trumpet, Roy’s novel is one of the few that stand out in terms of the representation of older female characters.
The title of this novel is taken from the proverb, ‘It ain’t over till the fat lady sings’, which is understood to mean that we don’t know how a situation will resolve itself until it actually does. It is appropriate for a novel that offers no easy resolutions. The reader is taken on a journey and then it’s up to them to continue the ‘what happens next’ in their imagination.
CHAPTER ONE
I hear the nurses say they’re fetching a new patient so I position myself in the corridor to get the best view. Alex stands beside me and I shoo her away. She wanders to the day room but she soon returns. Don’t have the heart to send her off again. Can’t see why they let a little girl like her remain on the ward. I ask her age and she tells me she’s fifteen. A fifteen-year-old child on a ward full of shouting and swearing and all kinds of sorrow. She’s supposed to be on bed rest because she’s thin like string and getting thinner all the while. Never seen a black girl have white girl slim disease before. I said it to her once, not right out, and she asked what I meant, but I never told her straight, it seemed too cruel. A nurse sees her standing in the corridor and takes her back to bed. She can’t hardly walk from lack of nourishment. It’s a shame how this country crushes the youth.
The new patient takes her time to reach the ward. I hear her come long before I see her. She’s yelling like a higgler, a whole mix of things, some of it about a baby, some of it about a man named Clyde.
And I tell you this, she is mean like a mongoose with a snake. As she comes through the door, she kicks the male nurse on the shin. I smile at her. Don deserves everything he gets.
They try to calm her. ‘Come on love, you’re safe here, no one’s going to hurt you,’ Hilary says, and she tries to sound like she believes it.
She don’t behave like she’s convinced. She kicks at Don again; as he avoids the blow he’s thrown off balance, so he has to let her go. He cusses all the while, even worse than her, fucking this and fucking that, forgetting he should set an example. Before he can catch hold of her, she runs down the corridor. They all chase after her. I put my bet on Hilary, but Louise gets there first. Long-shot Don is miles behind – he needs to give up smoking. But he still has the strength to tackle her when he arrives. Just when Lou and Hilary get it sorted out, he has to play the hero, bring her to her knees. She bites. He bawls. That is the good part.
She is small and thin with hair cropped close to her head. Her dark brown legs are bare even though it’s cold like ice and all she has on is a pair of knickers and a grubby vest. I hope it don’t shame her later on when she gets back to full consciousness. I look upon her face and for a moment, she looks back at me. I see that she is beautiful.
Don goes to fetch Dr Raines. Three against one but still they have to call up reinforcements. They don’t care if she is petrified and in a state of shock. Instead, they get her to the floor and hold her down. Hilary still whispers soothing things but Louise stands over her and waits for Dr Raines to bring the hypodermic needle.
And then he arrives, a big sergeant major, strutting up the corridor like he owns the place. He looks down at the scene and gives his orders out, trying to reach above the sound of the new patient who is wailing fit to bust the walls of Jericho. A diazepam injection, to be followed later by chlorpromazine. No one bothers to be gentle with the needle. There. Now don’t you feel a whole lot better dear? Just what the doctor ordered.
‘What are you doing, Gloria?’
It’s Don. I never saw him sneaking up on me. ‘I want to go to the toilet,’ I say to him, in my stupid-patient voice.
‘Well the toilets aren’t round here. You should know that by now.’
‘Yes, Buckra,’ I reply. Can’t help but laugh. He gives this look that says he knows he’s missing something but he can’t see what it is. All the while, he sucks the bitten finger. He views it as a black thing, a savage thing, I see it in his eye. All the time they just keep on provoking us. Then when we strike back, it proves all the prejudice they carry in their hearts.
‘Go on, get off to the toilet then. Or go to the day room. Just don’t hang around here. What’s going on with another patient is no concern of yours.’
I go a little way up the corridor. Then I turn back to look. Dr Raines disappears into his office at the bottom of the ward. The nurses haul up the new patient and heave her to the dormitory. All attention is on her. The other patients huddle up in rows, scared but excited by the scene.
There is sudden quiet. In the upheaval no one thinks to check on me. I open up the door so soft that no one even turns. In a moment I’m off the ward, in the main building of the hospital. All kinds of patients here, not just the mental ones: legs and arms bandaged up and hands encased in plaster. I start to drag my leg, like it’s my hip not my heart that’s hurting. And slow, like I have the right to do it, I walk into the open air and through the iron gate.
It’s raining outside and I don’t have no coat, so I wrap my arms around me to keep warm. Funny thing that – big as I am, I still feel the cold. Everyone in the street is dressed in winter clothes or has umbrellas up, so I stand out. Wish I never worn my red and purple frock.
I am tempted to run, but this will make me stand out more. Maybe Don is coming after me, or Lou. I look around all furtive, but there is no one to be seen. Looks like I’m going to make it after all. But no, I forgot – change of shift. The afternoon crew are walking up the road, not together, no, that would be too easy. In a little line, one by one, so I know I have to dodge each one of them. I think fast, run back through the gate and hide behind the bins. I wrap my dress around me so it don’t billow out and give the game away. Can’t help but laugh. I can see myself, a fat old black woman, with a bright coloured frock pulled up round her knees, creeping round the bins, ducking and diving like a twelve-year-old about to be caught smoking in the bike shed. I would say how the mighty have fallen, but I never been mighty in my life unless you talk in terms of width. Feeling rather foolish now, so as soon as it seems safe, I emerge, shamefaced, I have to say, but at least I’m off the ward and free.
I go to the bus stop and find my luck is in. As soon as I arrive, the bus pulls up. I pay my fare with the loose change in my pocket and sit on the top deck. Always used to sit upstairs with Josie. As the bus moves slow I watch the passers-by. The world goes on the same, as if Josie’s still alive and nothing’s changed. Everywhere I look, the future stares me in the face. Billboards. Hoardings. All about tomorrow. But the funny thing is, since I got put in hospital, it’s as if time has stopped and the future’s been squeezed out of me. It’s all past and present now, as if the future don’t exist.
I never smoked in the whole of my life, but lately I been thinking I should take it up. The back seat of the bus is just the place, and as far as I can see, no one ever stops you or makes you pay the fine. Getting rebellious in my old age. Shame it took so long.
Seeing as I have no cigarettes to hand, I eat some chocolate. Always keep some in my pocket in case of an emergency. If I was rich, I’d eat twelve bars a day and forget about my teeth.
I’m going home. Just the thought is enough to make me want to sing. But singing is what caused me all this trouble in the first place and got me on the ward, so I suck my lips and try to keep the sound from bursting out. Can’t help it though. The sound fills up the bus. Soon I am singing like I never sung before. The other passengers take one look at me and make themselves go thin in their seat, like they don’t exist. They don’t want me to trouble them. They don’t want to talk to some mad old woman with a dark complexion, oh dear no. Eyes down. Lips pursed tight. A few tut-tuts from the front seat. I have to get off before my stop – too much pointing. The conductor threatens to summon the police. If they stop me now, it will be straight back to the hospital. I’m on a section, not allowed to leave the ward. It’s a legal thing.
