Bina (pronounced Bye-na) is an angry 74-year-old woman who has “had enough.” From her bed, on discarded envelopes and receipts, she writes her story: “I was always remarking to myself, but now I’m doing my remarking in a more formal capacity for yourselves, and for after I’m gone, and I am very glad of it. For it has been a long life of being talked at, often unintelligently, and at this late hour in the departure lounge of life, I am happy to do the full remarking aloud and down onto these papers.”
Bina tells us about Eddie who
inserted himself into her life for a decade during which time “Within these
four walls it was persistence, it was never living.” She calls him an “ordeal creator” who became
violent and used her property for criminal activities: “The man is a lying hoar. He has lied far and wide and double-eared for
10 years. He’ll lie til the pyramids are
fully eroded and rebuilt in Lego.” She
is overjoyed that he is gone but is ever fearful that he will return.
Bina introduces us to the Tall
Man who recruited her into a group; “What he wanted me to do eventually became
a mountain of woe and had me sent inside prison for a week.” Now she is awaiting trial on serious charges. Members of the group, whom she calls
Crusties, are camped out in her yard: “They
are outside camping with their clipboards, in case the Guards come for me.”
Bina had two friends, Tomás and Phil, but both are
gone so she finds herself very much alone.
She has decided to write her story to warn people not to repeat her
mistakes; she feels she has “been handed this here undertaking. To.
Deliver. These. Warnings.
I am a practical woman, there’s nothing I like more than to be useful
and this here makes me useful.” In fact, much of what she writes consists of warnings.
For example, “if you are thinking of opening your hearth or your
heart. Don’t.” and “I would warn you never to disclose your
dark thoughts but to constantly disclose your truthful thoughts, because it’s
only the dark ones that follow when the truthful ones are hid.” and “Don’t do
the things you’re not supposed to do.
Even if people ask you to do them.
Don’t.” and “Another
warning: Careful what you think you are
hiding, as it’s probably on full view.
Careful not to hide suffering because you are only making more work for
the people who have yet to discover it.” and “Sacrifice is a stupid thing that
women do. Don’t do it. The men don’t notice.”
Bina also writes her conclusions
about life based on what she has experienced.
She comments on various topics like ageism (“I’m not a young person so I
am used to being ignored”) and media (“It’s a funny thing when the papers write
about you or the TV tells about you, but they have not talked to you. . . . They
give you a voice based on what they believe your actions are. They talk about you like they are speculating
through binoculars”) and the treatment of women (“They were not giving up
because I was a woman and I was grabable”).
She mentions that “There’s nothing quite as confusing as yourself, I
concluded. This is likely why so many of
us succumb to absolute confusion, the dementia, in the end.” and “if you tell
people the truth they won’t believe you, but tell them lies and they’ll believe
all of it.” and “We cannot know every reason a person has for doing a thing.”
There are some wonderful touches
of humour:
“A man though, he could get into
your kidneys and irritate them & you in a very special way. It’s why women are up in the night to go to
the toilet as they age. They are
widdling the confused strain of anger gathered up in there all day. I’ve no explanation as to why men are up
piddling all night too, except perhaps it’s God’s subtle way of tormenting
them. He goes straight for the pipe does
our Saviour.”
and
“There’s a new fella out there,
the lanky looper I call him, with a thin face and a long beard that might have
food gone relic inside it. He has it
twisted down to a point and a red elastic band put on it with a bead or three,
and he looks surgically demented. I don’t
care what you put on yourself. I wouldn’t
care if you tattooed a droopy spider on your baldhead like a lampshade, but a grown
man with three pink beads hanging from his chin is disturbing.”
and
When her lawyer tells her to
watch her words because “’You’re going to scupper us all if you keep this up,’” she thinks, “Last I checked there are
no double berths for the convicted and their solicitors in any prison in this
country.”
Because the style is unconventional,
the narrative is fractured. Bina circles
around events without fully explaining herself so it takes a while to
understand, for example, what work she actually did with the group. She says that she is being vague so she doesn’t
implicate herself; because of legal reasons, she “cannot articulate without
getting in trouble.” She repeats herself
to emphasize her message but also because she is forgetful. She admits that “My memory isn’t great so you
may have to read a few things twice” and bemoans how “A name, a word, a
meaning, a person, it’s all unthreading and blowing out the backdoor of my
mind.” She often addresses the reader
directly: “Don’t forget, when you can’t
remember, it’ll come back to you.”
Sometimes she speaks about herself in the third person.
There are sections which read
more like poetry than prose:
I
panicked too much.
It’s
been a lifetime of panic. Eddie would
make you panic. It’s how he is.
Sirenic.
Claxonic.
Awful.
Awful.
Awful.
At times the language reminded of
e e cumming’s poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town”: “This wasn’t unusual heard. It wasn’t unusual to hear it. You could not
at all it. You could not at all them. But you couldn’t eradicate the thought of
it. You couldn’t get at the part of them
that had started to feel it or had maybe felt it all their lives. You wouldn’t even know what someone felt all their
lives and whether it was now or then they were feeling it and when was then and
how was now? Maybe they could barely
arrive at now because of then.”
This would probably be considered
a difficult book. Early on, Bina
actually mentions this:
But
this hasn’t been a difficult book yet.
Bina’s
not for difficult books.
Life
is full of difficulty, so if she were ever to lie down and take up a book, it
couldn’t be a difficult one.
I’d
never read that rubbish, she’d say of this book.
It
would give me bad dreams.
Despite the book’s challenging
style, serious subject and often melancholic tone, I highly recommend it. Bina’s
voice is one you will not soon forget.
Note: I received a digital galley of this book from
the publisher via NetGalley.
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