Feet

I stayed awake all night, the other night, and this is why. 

I stayed awake because I remembered a question I asked. And the question was about how many past fractures are visible in x-rays of my hands and feet. Because I've had broken bones before, I've had them when they've been treated and when they've been left untreated, and I have more than one misshapen digit to show for it. And there are some very obvious events surrounding some of those breakages, and yet that feeling persists of another hidden story. How many other fractures are recorded, remembered by my body?

When I remembered the question, it was as if my inner child leaned over and pointed. She pointed at one of my feet... and a doorway opened in my mind. And behind that doorway was an afternoon, on a verandah with a concrete floor, when an angry Frenchwoman was unable to direct her vehemence at my sibling, so she rounded on me instead. As she approached me in her fury, she swiped at my head and I threw my arms up defensively in front of my face. She grabbed my arms, as if to restrain me. As I tried to step back from her, she swung round and stomped hard on my foot. 

I was only wearing thongs, and her hard artificial foot in her heeled shoe and the force of her stepping downwards, whether in anger or to prevent herself from stumbling, was terrible. 

I screamed and started crying, and her instant response was to slap me hard on the face. 

In the tussle (her grabbing my arms and me stepping away), she had stumbled, hurt her amputated stump, and, she said, also twisted her back. Her pain was immediately greater, somehow, than mine, and she blamed me fully for it. She blamed me for the injury she sustained while trying to hit me around the head. And she became the injured party and she required the ministrations and constant loving attention of my mother, and it was my sibling who led me back to my room, who gave me some ice and found some tissues and hugged me until I stopped crying. 

(I remember my sibling had been learning first aid, and so when we had no bandaids, they made improvised bandages by folding the tissues into long thin shapes held together with sticky tape. They turned it into a game, so that in the end I was laughing, despite the pain. Which is just as well, because it was hours before we were allowed out of our room again).

In the days that followed, La Narcisse's injury took on an even larger status in our family dynamic. She required to closet herself away, to rest in the airconditioning, to be taken plates of specially prepared food, to not emerge again for several days or speak to me, except for the cold verbal censures she delivered through my mother. My punishment was to be "sent to Coventry" (as she called it) and grounded. Which is laughable, because we so rarely went anywhere or did anything other than school and church and running their errands, so they could get rid of us for the hour or two it took on foot on the long hot dusty road to the shops to buy cigarettes and cask wine, and back again. But I was grounded anyway, and this meant that when my mum went to the library, I was not allowed to go. I was denied reading material, on top of not being allowed to go anywhere or watch television or do any other activities. And later I was punished several more times for doing things like reading something I found at home, or doing a word puzzle that I'd brought home from my previous trip to my grandmother's, or going for a swim (at home) one afternoon when they were out, or for some other reason which followed on as a consequence of me breaking some additional implied restriction associated with being "grounded". And this remained the case, as I remember, for some days or weeks afterwards, with all the attendant social consequences. It went on long enough, and I committed enough infractions against the subsequent and increasingly punitive restrictions that I no longer had a clear sense of why exactly I was being punished to start with. I remember trying to explain to someone, a man who was there visiting one day, why I was grounded, and what being grounded meant, and getting mixed up and trying to justify it, even though what I was being punished for was an abusive act of violence by a perpetrator whose projection of their guilt towards me was relentless. 

I remember that it took several weeks for my foot to heal up properly. There were abrasions as well as contusions on the top of my foot, and a couple of my toes were badly mashed up on the nails and toe tips. One of them was worse, and took longer to heal. I'm not sure if it was this time (a few weeks later), or another time, but I remember being on holidays again at my grandmother's, and attempting to jam my still-mashed (and by then, a little infected) toe into the too-small sandshoes that were all I had to wear in the cold weather, and how I kept quiet about my toe and how I didn't even say anything about the shoes being too small because that conversation would be about my feet and then someone would ask how it happened. And I remember how painful that infected toe in that too-small shoe was and how I started crying at the shops, and the people whose lovely outing I had ruined were nothing but kind. How they took me home and put my foot up on a pillow and brought out the mercurochrome and the first aid powder and talked to me with gentle words and cut the crusts off the sandwich and peeled a peach and made me chicken noodle soup like I was an invalid, just for an hour or two. And someone lent me their soft-knitted slipper so I could walk around in something warm and soft, and I went home to my grandmother's in borrowed socks and sandals. And whether or not that was during the aftermath of the time La Narcisse stomped on my foot and then slapped me for it, it was a kindness that I did not know at home, not during those years when La Narcisse's spite and méchanceté and cruelty set the tone for everything. 

And that too is my trauma. That there were whole afternoons, days, weeks of golden, loved kindness when I was surrounded by people whose first instinct was care, not cruelty. That I lived, even then, in a fractured border zone between people who loved each other and showed it in their actions, and the other tiny world in which love was a twisted, distorted thing that hit you first and then punished you for weeks afterwards until you were totally confused about why you deserved it. And that brokenness has stayed with me. I have gone through my whole adult life keeping myself more distant from other people than is optimal to create close, nurturing relationships... because distance equals extra seconds to escape the shouting and the hitting and the weeks and weeks afterwards of being punished and excluded and made wrong for everything. And this trauma remains. It remains, dormant, until one evening years later, when you catch a glimpse of a photo of vintage fabric that is similar (but not really) to the cotton nightie you were wearing that day and then it all comes pouring out. It comes pouring out first as a tiny question in your mind, that stays with you until you write it down, and then it gets impatient and stands in front of you and bends over and points at what you must remember. Your foot. An afternoon on a verandah, an angry Frenchwoman, and an entire decade of abuse.