MOLLY ELIZA
GOUGH
Strings 2
‘about lighthouses not having to move to save a ship’
September 2024
from Earworm
[Sirens]
Can’t you see they’re just waiting for a chance to put us into the box they’ve already picked out for us? To assign us to the class of people who they assume is beneath them.
Can’t you see this is what he wants?
Can’t you tell he’s goading you to react?
Can’t you tell you’re playing right into his hands?
Don’t let his storyline go according to plan.
Steady your breathing when the policewoman asks you what happened tonight.
Can’t you see they’re not on our side?
Can’t you hear the police and him laughing in the lounge, while you’re the one being questioned?
Have you been drinking tonight?
Patronising bitch, I said.
But of course, I didn’t say that. I was six and doubt I knew what a bitch was, but I swear I thought it, as if retrieved from a nook in my skull from a past life.
Adjust your posture, blink your eyes awake, pick up your chin from your chest, enunciate. Open the door and close it behind your words, don’t let them slip through.
Muster some semblance of control for god’s sake and say no mum.
Somehow, I know this plot all too well, I have seen this TV-Drama play out already.
They’re going to pin this on you.
Blame the victim, not that they truly think of you as that.
Yes, I’m six, sitting on your lap, my legs dangling off your side and I have seen this all before.
They pin it all on you.
They look past your bruising and me, the crying child in your arms and warn you not to waste police time again.
They arrest you and your ex-husband who arrived not long after them, following the SOS your children managed to send with the cheap Nokia’s he bought for emergencies.
They put your two children, both under ten in the back of a police car in the middle of a school night in December wearing nothing but their pyjamas.
They drive them the hour to your mother’s house, slamming the doors so the whole cul-de-sac wakes.
Two pairs of cold feet, one pair, your son’s, swings in excitement about the fact that he’s sitting in a life size version of one of the models that lines his windowsill.
The other pair belongs to your daughter, who they had to pry off your body like a cat on a carpet.
I remain stone faced and dig my feet into the back of the seat in front of me, where the policewoman who’d earlier shamed you sits.
Letting out a smirk from underneath the stone whenever the policewoman shifts in her seat, I press harder hoping to eventually hear the lady’s spine click.
It didn’t and the woman never said a word.
Your son asked if the policeman driving could turn on the siren and lights like he’d seen on The Bill.
The police obliged, only for a short burst and my brother laughed in return.
He’s three years older than me, but I’d always adopted the role of the older sibling.
I believed to be doing him a favour, and still do, relieving him of a duty to protect as if he were a retired service dog.
With your son still giggling I swat his arm and spit in his ear, they’re not our friends, to which his amusement comes to a grounding halt.
When you argued and you got angry with me, I would write notes on scrap paper asking if we could be friends again.
You realised, or maybe you never did, that even at a young age my abandonment issues were raucous.
That I didn’t have the capacity for indifference, that either people were my friends, or they hated me, and vice versa.
I was completely unforgiving then, and I’m the same now.
[The whistle of my father]
Now in my late twenties I talk to Dad about our inherited rage as we drive. About the night he answered our SOS and how he broke every speed limit to get to us. How that night when my mum told him to kill her then partner, he felt himself capable. We share anecdotes and revel in the similarities of our symptoms. Particularly the shaking afterwards, hours of not being able to let it go even when the situation has long been dissolved. We share a rage that can eat us whole - instead of the rage simply living within us, the vessel, the rage becomes the vessel in which we live. We can and will, fight for fighting’s sake; we would thrive for a cause.
[The city]
Living in a major city it’s not long until you realise that men rarely move out of the way for you. I would intentionally play a game of chicken with men on the street, knowing full well they wouldn’t move, and neither would I. We’d eventually collide, our shoulders smashing together, and it would hurt. I would hold eye contact as they looked back dumbfounded. There was a point near the end of my time in the city where I’d do this every day, multiple times a day, adjusting lanes to be face to face with a man. Some evenings when I undressed, I’d find a trail of small purple bruises starting at my shoulder leading to my collarbone.
[Blue velvet]
Kind eyes, my nan says, always go for the ones with the kind eyes. I have kind eyes, but my ex’s held a kindness that made me feel the need to confess. Confess the moments when I’ve been nothing but a bad taste in another's mouth. I worry that my sweetness doesn't come close to the majority, that my bite is rather bitter. That my mother was right when she said I possess qualities of the men that wronged her. Like the canine ability to see unwanted spirits in a room, it's possible there's an inherited evil in me that only a mother can see.
[The train approaching]
The water’s reflection projects itself onto his naked torso as the train pulls into Rugby. I’m watching The Octopus Teacher on Netflix on the train home from the city as part of research for a press release, I’ve offered to write for a friend’s solo show. While the female octopus fights to outswim her predator, the filmmaker narrates that she and her species have spent millions of years trying to make themselves impossible to find. To hide is their survival instinct of choice and their dynamic spectrum tells the viewer they’re perpetually in survival. She camouflages herself, shapeshifts between spikey, smooth, hostile and fragile. One minute she can seem non-threatening, seconds later she can grow literal horns.
She latched onto the narrator with the same severe suctioning she used to secure herself onto the back of the shark that was hunting her just moments ago. When she clings to him, just like the shark, her skin imitates the marbling the water has left on his body. He interprets the imitation as flattery. He strokes her and she leads him to believe he’s her safe space. That she loves him and that she’s oblivious to the fact that he’s her (and her home’s) deadliest predator. Whenever she reaches a tentacle out to him, it reminds me of the times I placate the customer who orders a smile with every Latte with the compromise of a rather toothless pursing.
Self-preservation: the ability to know what to do to stay alive. Some of us are taught this skill very early on in life, usually under threat. Funnily enough those of us tapped into our survival day to day probably live much shorter lives. Gliding back and forth in the thick kelp saturated by their ink, her species have an average life span of a year.
MOLLY ELIZA GOUGH is a writer from the West Midlands, currently completing a Master’s in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her writing most recently appears in the publication from Pilot Press, Responses to Love's Work (1995) by Gillian Rose. She has also been awarded The White Pube writers grant in association with Creative Debuts, with some samples of writing published on their website. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Central Saint Martins and in the years since graduating has worked consistently on a substack called Press & Release, growing a significant number of subscribers.
