I’m seven years old and can hear a bluebottle coursing my bedroom wall. I listen to how his wing vibrates on the wallpaper and debate whether to kill him. Above everything, I want to be kind but the bluebottle beats its wings approximately 150 times a second and I swear I can hear every thrash. I am too small to usher him from the room and it’s too late to wake my parents so I lie there for hours and the sound buzzes in my head long after the bluebottle leaves.
It is summer, which I hate, because the sun and light are everywhere. The light I deal with by hiding but the heat can catch me anywhere and when it gets past 20°, it feels like my blood is boiling my skin. It gets much worse when my parents bring my brother and me on a sun holiday to the Costa del Sol for a fortnight. I spend most of the time in the apartment bedroom with cold compresses on my head like a dying Victorian child.
I fall over, under, down. I drop glasses, bowls, eggcups. I can’t seem to exit my bedroom without bumping into the doorframe. I see my mother, the embodiment of kindness, stifle a giggle as I try to Irish dance or ride a bike. Oddly, I’m not too bad at roller-skating; I spend the entire time looking at my feet then letting my stride end by banging against a wall. When I brave the road outside our home, I find only criticism and I don’t have anywhere to place it. I have a rhotacism and even manage to pronounce my name incorrectly. When girls whisper about me, I hear every word they say.
I struggle to understand the relationship between myself and physical space. My life seems secure only if I don’t move too far or too fast. But also words exist in space, especially speech, in a way that pinches me. I go from feeling perforated to completely transparent. There is a gap between the soles of my feet and the ground below; it’s as if I exist somewhere between the living and the dead. My 20-year-old neighbour dies by suicide and I envy her exit from the world. I become convinced that a world without sun, without light, without sound, essentially no world at all, is my safest bet.
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My mother shares the proverb with me: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never harm me’ but I loved sticks and stones much more than I did other people. When my father has to cut down the dying eucalyptus tree in our garden, I secretly stash some of the bark in my room before the tree is dumped. My mother discovers it when a family of ants sets up home under my bedroom locker. Stones had to stay where they found themselves. And most importantly, they didn’t speak. Words, however, were alive and made their way through me like nails.
Part of the prescription my mother gave me to ensure I would continue to live were regular trips to the library. There was a paradox of course to my world; I stayed inside to avoid it but nothing grounded me more than being in nature so I left for the fields and mountains in my head; through books like The Secret Garden, Under the Hawthorn Tree and a book my father owned on America which contained pictures of trees I had never seen before; live oaks, red maples and black walnuts. I based many life decisions, especially moves, on what trees I might live with in the next location and the books that resonated most contained strange and suffering children who found ways to survive and transcend immobility.
Whatever is thought of people like me by doctors or teachers or strangers, I know the limitations of one word to describe my ever-evolving reality. I have been able to continue living both despite and because of the people I have met. Sometimes, they have been friends who like me experience the boundary between their body and the world as paper thin and I’ve also been drawn to those who have thick borders with the world; their distance has made me stronger and I hope my proximity has done the same for them.
I find myself at a meridian point; I have the strength to create my own words on a page now and I do currently see my first book as a rescue mission. I have been writing it under the title, Paper People, for a while because I wanted to understand how fictional characters (made from paper and ink and imagination) transform our reality. But the title has now evolved to Paper Kinder. Each connected story is about a child at the age of seven who experiences life as more cruel than kind. Kinder in my title refers to both the German word for children and also the English comparative form of ‘kind’. Adam Phillips wrote: “Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity”.
Perhaps for the first time, I’ve found a way to write out of a place of aspiration and desperation; compulsion and repulsion, but above all, kindness. This means it will be slow. I live in a world where the sun persists, sounds are everywhere and not everyone can be saved, but the gift is the curse: the curse is the gift.
Sarah Byrne writes, edits and mentors for a living. She lives mostly in Paris where she is writing her first book, Paper Kinder. She will teach and read at this year’s West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry.
