Sharp scratch, p.1
Sharp Scratch, page 1
SHARP SCRATCH
Martine Bailey
For everyone who struggles to find their place
in a world of cold conformity.
‘Dark, unfeeling and unloving powers determine human destiny.’
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
by Sigmund Freud
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Sadism
Radicalism
Suspiciousness
Self-sufficiency
Callousness
Warm-heartedness
Conservatism
Erratic Lifestyle
Shrewdness
Antisocial Behaviour
Seriousness
Reputation Management
Emotional Instability
Coalition Building
Dominance
Instrumentalism
Group Dependency
Numerical Reasoning
Artlessness
Blame Externalisation
Cynicism
Anxiety
Tender-mindedness
Rule Consciousness
Memory Disturbances
Depression
Impulsive Nonconformity
Guilt-proneness
Imagination
Magical Thinking
Parasitic Lifestyle
Threat Sensitivity
Irresolution
Carefree Nonplanfulness
Transliminality
Demoralisation
Machiavellian Egocentricity
Prudence
Grandiosity
Expedience
Absorption
Practicality
Disorganised Cognition
Psychopathy
Hypomania
Abstract Thinking
Autobiographical Memory
Entitlement
Faking Good
Self-control
Surgency
Altruism
Narcissism
Adventurousness
Resilience
Exhibitionism
Dissociation
Depersonalisation
Manipulation
Detachment
Afterword
About the Author
Copyright
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Personality tests like the one in this book are designed to measure traits, the habitual patterns of behaviour, thought and emotion that seem to make you ‘you’. Each chapter is headed by a fictional test question intended to reflect that chapter’s theme. I hope you find it entertaining to ask yourself the questions; if you agree with option ‘A.’ you are identifying with that trait’s description written out below it. This is of course not a scientific test: if you agree with a single trait associated with depression or psychopathy, that does not mean you are depressed or a psychopath!
Any credible test would consider the combination and interaction of the different traits you identify with and their measurement on a scale from high to low. The fictional PX60 test in part reflects the thinking back in 1983, whereas today more attention is paid to the demonstration of different traits in a variety of situations – for example, ‘I may be aggressive and loud at a football match but quiet and submissive at work’. Similarly, traits can change over time and our differing cultures, learning and life opportunities all contribute to making us unique individuals.
Sadism
Instructions
This is a questionnaire concerning your interests, preferences and feelings about a range of things. There is no time limit.
Be as honest and truthful as you can. Don’t give an answer just because it seems to be the right thing to say.
Question 1: If people were more honest, they would admit that torture is interesting.
A. True
B. Uncertain
C. False
High score description (option A.): Cruelty, an intrinsic pleasure in hurting and humiliating others.
My past is confined in a box of steel. Though memories beg for release, I keep them carefully padlocked, deep in the cellar of my mind.
I review an old favourite: The Glen, Salford, 1963. I watch Christie staring out from the top window of Wilkins Boarding House, one of the largest of a street of shabby villas, mostly divided into mismatched flats. She is waiting for her landlady, keeping vigil over a road that has few cars, no children, no pets. A coalman’s horse and cart clops along the cobbles to the next house along. He heaves his sacks up the alley, whistling tunelessly, his eyes white in his sooty face.
Next Mrs Wilkins comes hobbling into sight, her spine bent from a life of drudgery. At the front gate she sets down two weighty shopping bags to get her breath back, admiring her smart painted sign: ‘The Wilkins Boarding House – Hot and cold water. Special rates for hospital staff’. Replenished with puff and pride, she disappears up the steps and the front door bangs.
The coalman and his cart disappear. When all is quiet, Christie noiselessly descends to where Mrs Wilkins is brewing tea in the kitchen. The landlady looks up when the door opens. She’s a sinewy, nervy woman, faded at sixty, her myopic eyes magnified behind round NHS spectacles.
‘Oh, hello. Did they let you off early?’
An excuse is made. Then the suspicious little face peers up from the tea caddy.
‘You ’aven’t seen me old carpetbag, ’ave you? Last time I seen it I’m sure it were up on the wardrobe. It’s got all me important papers and that locked up in it.’
Christie dolefully shakes her head, a parody of innocence.
Just then the kettle starts up like a banshee screaming a warning. The landlady rescues it from the flame, and it quiets to fitful sighs. Her big watery eyes catch sight of the bottle filched from the medicine cupboard.
‘Fancy you getting hold of that health tonic from the hospital for me,’ she says, savouring a rare dose of attention. ‘Go on. I could do with giving me feet a rest.’
It’s quite something, Christie’s Treatment Room. There’s even a neat wooden sign on the door like a proper clinic. It took time to create it, to arrange the perfect setting for Christie’s most private fantasies. Best of all, she arranged to take the unwanted fittings from the abandoned operating theatres when they knocked half the asylum down. She salvaged some real beauties: a rubber anaesthetic mask, and a set of original glass and steel syringes. Her pride and joy is the antique treatment couch. It’s hard leather, weighty and strong, with the original straps and buckles still taut and secure.
Mrs Wilkins follows her downstairs and through the Treatment Room door like a pet lamb to the slaughter. Suddenly she spots the wax display of a brain beneath a dome of glass.
‘It’s a bit funny down here, in’t it? All this peculiar equipment you’ve gone and got hold of.’
Christie gestures to the couch. Mrs Wilkins clambers up, then lies on her back, pulling her skirt down over thick stockings, preserving her pathetic modesty. Christie rolls up the landlady’s sleeve and bares her withered arm. The patient needs to be quiet. To relax. To do as she is told. Only when Christie starts to bind her arm with the leather strap does she start twitching.
‘Eh, what d’you think you’re doing?’
It’s too late. The large old-fashioned syringe looms above her. Mrs Wilkins’ eyes open so wide, they might pop. The other gloved hand clamps her nose and mouth. When the old bat tries to bite the hand that restrains her, the needle stabs into scrawny flesh. With the release of the syringe comes the thrill as the lethal dose surges into a vein. The old woman writhes helplessly; her glasses tumble to the floor.
She finally comprehends her fate in wide-eyed horror. The whimpering stops. Pupils shrink to pinpricks. Life ends, snuffed out, as a great black veil falls. The sensation is like nothing else, better than any sexual thrill, this extinction of another person.
On the floor the spectacles lie twisted, the cracked lenses forever dimmed.
Later, Christie returns to the kitchen with the carpetbag. One by one she removes each document and inspects them. It is mostly rubbish, ancient stuff from the war, faded letters, cheap Christmas cards. A bundle of these are shoved into the fire. Placed to one side is the Last Will and Testament of Mrs Ida Wilkins, which leaves her entire estate to The Methodist Mission for Charity in Africa.
By the light of the crackling fire Christie flattens out the will and begins to practise in a crabby, uneducated hand:
‘I devise and bequeath to my dear friend the property known as The Wilkins Boarding House …’
Radicalism
Question 2: I am frustrated by the routine nature of normal life.
A. True
B. Uncertain
C. False
High score description (option A.): Experimental, open to change, liberal, critical, free-thinking.
Sunday 13th February, 1983
What was she even doing here? Lorraine Quick was already late. And very tired. She had rushed to her mum’s at noon, feeling guilty to be leaving eight-year-old Jasmine for a whole week. The bag of sweets and cheap toys felt like a bribe. Her mum had been rightly offhand with her.
And then that gig. Why had they even bothered? To be bottom of the bill at some run-down pub and circled by a few dozen snarling yobs. The longer they played the angrier the blokes became, clearly aggrieved by a nearly-all-girl band who refused to flirt or giggle or follow their suggestion to ‘get ’em off for the lads’. Lily had thrown back a few cutting re torts but honestly, what was going on? Then the landlord had waved Lorraine away when she asked for their fee. Yet again, she’d have to pay for the petrol. And all the oafs around the bar had laughed.
For the last four hours her only company along the long empty stretches of the M6 had been the cassette recording of her band’s last rehearsal. Christ, she felt alone. Things were not going well. Life felt like a battleground. And call it intuition but she sensed that matters were only getting worse. Now, to crown it all, she was lost in the benighted streets of Oxford.
At last her headlamps picked up a wooden board and made out the words ‘Wyndham College closed’. After parking up she wondered if she’d catch any of the course introduction. She tried knocking on the ancient door of the porter’s lodge that skinned her freezing knuckles. Oxford on a Sunday night in February felt like a stronghold of unclimbable walls and padlocked iron gates.
She gave the door a rattling kick for good measure. Still no answer. A few yards away a door opened in the wall and a half-dozen Sloane Ranger types emerged. Lorraine glared at them.
‘How the bloody hell do I get in?’ she called out.
A young guy with floppy hair and a shiny waistcoat mocked her accent, ‘’Ow the bluddy ’ell do a get in?’
Their hoots of laughter seemed to ascend to the city’s spires. Lorraine glowered after them, her fists tightening. At last a light flickered on in the lodge, and she turned to see a uniformed porter’s sour face poking through the window.
‘College members only after six,’ he announced in a ridiculously plummy voice.
She rummaged in her old satchel. True, she was here only for a week’s study leave, but she had as much right as anyone else to pass through this gate.
‘Doctor Lehman’s course. Personality testing.’
‘I should have guessed. A public course. You’re late. Back of the quad.’
When she found her classroom, the entire roomful of delegates turned to stare at her peroxided hair bunched into a lopsided ponytail, biker jacket, Patti Smith T-shirt and buckled boots. They all wore their corporate best: padded shoulders and kipper ties. Some of the women sported big perms above giant blouse bows.
The course leader, Doctor Lehman, looked more interesting: fiftyish, grey bob, wearing a rainbow-coloured kaftan that might have been Zandra Rhodes. Two hawkish eyes fixed on Lorraine from behind a pair of red-framed spectacles.
‘Ms Quick, I presume. We were just discussing how a negative trait like rule-breaking might reveal itself in lateness, for example.’
Nervous titters broke out around the room. She read the slide projected on the screen: a scale showing degrees of ‘Self-discipline vs Rule-breaking’.
Slipping into a seat Lorraine replied, ‘But didn’t Professor Paston in his 1978 paper show that if we had no rule-breakers we’d all risk becoming – I’m quoting his words – “stagnant and boring”. We’d have no David Bowie. No Jesus Christ.’
The room fell silent. Doctor Lehman’s slightly magnified eyes fixed upon her, revealing amused approval.
‘Well, well. Someone has done the background reading. On that evidence alone I’ll raise your score by at least thirty per cent.’ She clicked a switch and the carousel moved to the next slide.
‘To know thyself is the road to wisdom.’ Aristotle. The aphorism was displayed across the screen beside a portrait bust of the philosopher.
Lorraine hoped this was true. At twenty-six, she still had no idea what she wanted from life. When Doctor Lehman spoke, she concentrated hard on her closing words.
‘You all have an intensive week ahead of you, even before we consider your return for the exam in just over three weeks’ time. This course will change you all – and I hope guide you on the path to wisdom. Because your first, most extraordinary subject is … yourself.’
As the initial training days unfolded, it dawned on her that passing the course might demand more than last-minute cramming for an exam. In one group exercise, Doctor Lehman had handed out each person’s scores and asked the whole group to form a line in sequence, from 1 to 100. Lorraine had the most extreme score of 94, so she got to hold a placard labelled ‘Radicalism’, while the guy who scored 22 stood at the other end of the line holding ‘Conservatism’. Doctor Lehman had described those with high scores for Radicalism as analytical and free-thinking, with a strong desire to overthrow current customs. Though feeling like the class weirdo, she was forced to agree with the description; it felt valid, a true reflection of the life she lived.
In her free periods she wandered in the wintry college gardens, surrounded by lichen-clad statues and dead trees. She wanted to hate the place; the Marxist lecturers on her degree would say it symbolised all that was wrong with Thatcher’s Britain. Pulling her purple mohair tight against the cold, she listened to her music on new Walkman headphones. Nico’s doleful Germanic tones pondered which costume to wear to a lifetime of decadent parties. Which indeed? If her future life must be a performance, she felt like an actor pushed on the stage without lines or disguise. Opening her course manual, she quailed at scary-looking equations to prove test reliability and calculate standard deviation.
One evening towards the end of the week, a rumbling organ drew her to the candlelit windows of the chapel. She sat in the shadows, succumbing to sound. The choir’s voices twined and untwined, swooped and soared. She didn’t flatter herself that she was much of a musician; she didn’t need to be a virtuoso to play in a post-punk band. But she did have the ear of a musician’s daughter. There is a reason these archaic notes are still played and sung, she mused, echoing across the days for hundreds of years.
Next day she found Blackwell’s bookshop and picked up The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Her daughter would love it and Lorraine was intrigued. Emblazoned across the front was ‘A game book in which YOU become the hero!’ Success or failure depended on how well the reader performed in a series of encounters, fights and mazes. It was a personality test, she realised, demanding all the heroic traits of a champion.
Back in her study bedroom overlooking a medieval courtyard, she ruminated over how uncomfortable she felt. She thought about norms and normality, about those people whose scores always placed them at the comfortable centre of the line-up. She guessed they must feel safe – content with their work, their spouses, their futures. She, on the other hand, was generally flung out onto the edges of the group – her brain wired to see things differently, sensitive to mental patterns and hidden possibilities. Whatever it was that made her different, she sensed its value was being utterly wasted in her job.
Sunday 20th February
On the final morning of the course, the group assembled in a classroom laid out in rows of individual desks. She breathed in the warm smell of beeswax polish, feeling scrutinised by the portraits of dozens of stiff-faced scholars. The full battery of PX60 psychometric tests took two hours, and though she enjoyed the quiz-like fun of it, she was now aware of a crafty aspect to the process. The questions were not quite what they appeared to be, and some were designed to trip up candidates who lied about themselves. It was called Motivational Distortion or ‘Faking Good’ – the attempt to present yourself as someone more conforming and desirable, someone who would fit in. Doctor Lehman sternly advised them to be true to themselves, answer quickly and state what they honestly believed – or the Motivational Distortion trap would catch them out.
It was late afternoon on Sunday and Lorraine was hanging around for Doctor Lehman’s final feedback appointment of the day. Finding a payphone in a passageway, she dialled the only friend she’d made at work. As well as being the right side of thirty, the medical records officer had immediately struck her as being a relatively sane person considering she was a hospital middle manager. Over snatched tea breaks in the League of Friends café, they had discovered they both had a child at St Michael’s. Rose didn’t want to tell her work colleagues about her son Tim, just as Lorraine kept schtum about Jasmine. In a flurry of heated confidences, they had both agreed that to be labelled a working mum by some of the bigots at work would be career suicide. And their friendship was proving useful, for Tim and Jasmine liked playing together, and had just spent the morning at Rose’s house.
