YOU NEVER LISTEN, DO YOU?

Not you. Me. Us. One. And you, too – except you’re listening now. I hope. THEY never listen.

Listen to what? To the things I say. To the things anybody says. That’s why there’s music everywhere. So no one has to listen any more. If they ever did.

I was in this shop. A clothes shop. I don’t know why I went there. Yes I do. I just don’t want to say. Hardly anybody buys clothes because they need them. They need something, that’s for sure, and buying clothes will give it to them. Or they think it will. Or at least trying to buy clothes will do it. Whatever “it” is.

I suppose if you’re buying clothes, or even just thinking about buying clothes, then there’s a lot of other things that you can’t be doing (fortunately!) and a lot of other things you can’t even be thinking about, which is also just as well.

Maybe you buy clothes to show you care about yourself. Show who? The shop-assistants? I don’t think! Though – maybe – maybe to show anybody who’ll look. And in the long run to show yourself that you care about yourself. Which isn’t actually as easy, or as common, as you might think.

Changing the way you dress yourself doesn’t actually change you, does it? It may change the way other people see you, and the way other people think about you, but does that actually make you any different? Are you really only what other people take you to be? I think not! I hope not.

The only other way that clothes could change you would be if you looked in a mirror all the time... Of course, other people are like a mirror, in a way, but a distorting mirror, sometimes... they certainly don’t always reflect what they see. And none of us actually watch ourselves, do we?

That would have to mean we were outside ourselves at the same time as we were inside ourselves, and that would be very difficult and very confusing. We might not know if we were the watcher or the watched.

Of course, you can see women playing that kind of complicated game in any clothes shop. They dart in to the rail and pick out a garment on its hanger and hold it up in front of them and go to the mirror and look at themselves.

They look at themselves – but what is it they see? No, I don’t think they’re looking at themselves; I think they’re looking for themselves. They’re saying: Is that person in the mirror the same person that I know is inside me? And sometimes they don’t recognise themselves and that’s good, and sometimes they don’t recognise themselves and that’s bad. And sometimes they don’t even know what the person inside them looks like. And sometimes they don’t want to know.

Of course, you can think of clothes as packaging for the body, just as you can think of the body as packaging for the soul. That’s a nice, neat solution. But being neat doesn’t make it true. And sometimes we buy a thing for the sake of the packaging, just as we go shopping for the experience, and not because there’s anything we need to buy.

Which is, if I’m honest, why I was in that shop. Not because of the clothes. It was a kind of old-fashioned boutique, “boutique” in inverted commas, with a stale air of joss-sticks and uncured afghan coats about it. I remembered it when it had been decorated with chicken-wire covered in papier-mâché and painted white, so it looked like a load of caves, or some exotic planet, or, to be honest, like a discarded set from the first series of Star Trek. No, let’s be really honest, however much it hurts: what it actually looked like, what it actually reminded me of, was Father Christmas’s Grotto when I was a little girl.

You know what I mean. You know what I mean, even if you don’t want to admit it. It was a fantasy landscape, where something magic could happen – like those landscapes you could imagine in the fire, in those bad old days when we burnt coal, and chasms and gulfs and abysses opened up in the grate, glowing impossibly red at first and then fading to feathery ash that was whipped away by a fierce draught, or smashed by your dad with a poker and covered with the smoking blackness of nutty slack.

The purpose of all that papier-mâché and chicken-wire was to disguise distances, to make you think you were much further away from the real world than was actually the case. You went round and round in circles, not touching the place you’d started, because a thin layer of chicken-wire and papier-mâché protected you from it and preserved your illusions intact. Had you wished to break through, it would have offered very little real resistance, but discovering the truth wasn’t in your interest (quite the contrary!) so you didn’t even make that minimal effort.

If you’d listened, you could have heard the voices of the people outside in the queue, discussing whether there was time to go to the toilet before it was their turn, or the voices of the people who’d gone in before you, going “Oooh! and “Aaah!” at the mechanical elves or the nodding reindeer or the dancing Polar bears. But you never listen, do you? You never listen to things you don’t want to hear. Instead, you shuffle on round like everyone else, absorbed in yourself, not really concerned with those who’ve been there before you or those who’ll come after you.

There were two shop assistants in the boutique, though I don’t see how it could have paid the wages of one. Maybe they were company for each other in the absence of customers. One on her own might have developed desert madness because of the solitude. They certainly had lively love-lives, to judge by the bits of conversation I overheard – but you don’t like to listen, do you – well, not too openly, anyway. And doing it surreptitiously wasn’t easy, either, because of the level of the music.

They let me take three garments into the changing-rooms: one that was completely the wrong size, frighteningly, embarrassingly so; one that was completely the wrong style; and one that was vaguely acceptable and cheap enough that I wouldn’t mind if it got ruined by red wine or pizza or somebody else’s vomit at the party I’d been invited to – flattered to be invited, but horrified because I knew everybody else would be far too young to want to bother mixing with me, except out of pity. Or else because they had confessions to make. That’s my trouble. I’m a good listener. It’s the up-side of not being a good talker.

At least the changing-rooms were individual cubicles. I’ve never quite got over my experience of the huge communal one at a Laura Ashley shop I went to once: lush velvet curtains guarded the entrance, outside which the usual raggle-taggle of attendant males were stationed, and inside there was a whole host of elegantly upholstered bucket-chairs and chaises-longues, with all these women dancing round in various stages of undress. Given the style of the frocks, the general impression was of an Edwardian brothel.

The boutique had gone vaguely techno (at least, that was the music playing) with quite a lot of mirror tiles and chopped up aluminium foil dangling from the ceiling. But when I got into the changing rooms, I found the same old pseudo-cave-walls. Comforting, really. Whatever you do to the outside, it’s still all the same underneath. Though I vaguely recalled there having been three actual changing-rooms leading off from the central area, not just the two I saw at present. I took the one that wasn’t on the cash-desk side, the one, that is, that was further away from the source of the music, and that’s probably why I heard what I heard.

Well, at first I thought it was the subtext of the record. You know these modern remixes, where they put some blameless piece of eighties tat into a disco beat and underlay it with an announcer’s voice reading a bulletin about the Falklands War? Terribly post-modern. I don’t think. Anyway, I could hear this voice talking under the music. You never listen, do you? Not to that sort of stuff. But after quite a short while, I realised it wasn’t some kind of rap at all. It was an ordinary, Southern English voice – and that’s never been marketable in the pop-world. Slightly whiny, slightly nasal, and very, very distressed.

I had to listen, really. I couldn’t help myself. I’ve had plenty of practice at it, and you don’t want to hear about that, believe me. And you certainly don’t want to hear the details of what this voice was saying. It was accusing itself, and the body to which the voice belonged, and the person to whom the body belonged, and the world, and life, in general and in particular. It went on and on. Not especially eloquent, but certainly very forceful. Very – inclusive. Parents. Friends. Lovers. Institutions. Nothing and no one escaped. Not very many swearwords. But a whole vat of despair, filled with the acid of resentment, and somebody splashing about in it and drowning.

You never like to listen to these things. And that was really why I wanted to intervene. Not because I thought I could help, or any nonsense like that, but because I couldn’t stand listening to it any longer. It was beginning to undermine me. It was saying exactly the things about my own stupid, ugly, over the hill body that no man would ever find attractive again – exactly the sort of stuff I’d been rehearsing and suppressing when I picked out the garment that would have been three sizes too small for me ten years ago, but I’d still brought into the changing room. That’s why you help people – because you don’t want to end up like them.

I wondered where on earth the voice could be coming from. The other cubicle was unoccupied, the silver-sprayed, glitter-dusted shower curtain (I told you the décor was tatty and tacky!) thrust back to reveal the knobbly off-white papier-mâché of a pseudo-cave-wall that lacked the artistic skill of Lascaux or Altamira. But the voice went on and on. It seemed to be behind the wall of my cubicle, on the side away from the cash-desk, where there was, indeed, more space than there should have been. And in the middle of that wall of my cubicle, opposite the mirror in which I had not yet examined all my own undeniable faults, there was a sort of swag of aluminium foil, pretending to be fabric. It was beside the hook where I had hung the clothes I had been going to try on, and I don’t know whether what happened was unconsciously deliberate or a genuine “accident” (if there is such a thing), but I caught it with the coat-hangers, and it ripped and fell down, being not only flimsy but also very poorly stuck.

It revealed the back of a mirror, not the newest of mirrors, with the brownish silvering beginning to go. The voice was definitely louder now – not that it had got louder, if anything its absolute volume had sunk as its vehemence and violence increased, but it was easier to hear. Drawn as if by instinct, I pressed my face to the back of the mirror and found that I could see through the damaged silvering to the face that was on the other side.

It wasn’t a bad face. It wasn’t ugly, or distorted, or stupid-looking or any of the things it had said about itself. It was puffy and red with crying and shiny with tears and the stuff that streams out of your nose when you cry too much, but it was a human face, when all was said and done. Somebody could have loved it. The woman on the other side of the mirror raised her arms to use the back of her hands to wipe away the tears and the mucus, and I saw the tell-tale scars on the wrists – maybe serious slashes, maybe just self-harming, some of them very fresh and angry. I began to get very, very scared. Then the woman turned away from the mirror, and I could hear her rummaging in her bag and the rattle of a plastic pill bottle. She turned back, one hand full of pills, and a bottle of water in the other, and toasting her reflection in the glass she began to swallow them in great choking gulps.

I knew there was no other way to get through to her, so I just pushed at the mirror from my side, and it fell through and smashed on the ground. Flimsy stuff, papier-mâché and chicken-wire, as flimsy as the illusions it gets used to create. Where the mirror had been, there was a gaping hole, and darkness. No woman. No changing-room. No voice. Just silence, and a large draughty space full of discarded boxes and polystyrene and dead coat-hangers. Just empty packaging and nothingness and the back of the walls. Chicken-wire shapes without the papier-mâché covering. That’s what you find when you break through the illusions: nothingness.

“Are you all right?” said one assistant behind me, but not too close.

“What’s the matter?” said the other also behind me and also not too close.

They weren’t really waiting for answers. They didn’t want to be told that I wasn’t, and I didn’t really know. They wanted to be reassured. I always give people what they want.

“I’m fine,” I said. “The mirror fell down – I didn’t know there was one there.”

“No,” said the one with the nose-ring. “There used to be another changing-room next door, but we blocked it off, after the – ”

“After the accident,” said the one with the eyebrow-ring and the tattooed ear-lobe.

“Aha,” I said, just to lead them on a little.

“Yes,” said the nose-ring. “We were afraid something like that might have happened to you – ”

“We didn’t find her till quite a while after it had happened – ” said the eyebrow-ring.

“And then it turned out she’d been talking all that while – delirious, I s’pose – and all the customers had heard her, but – well – ”

“You never listen, do you?” said the eyebrow-ring, helping her friend (if she was her friend) by finishing her sentence for her.

“No,” I said, “you never listen.”

I held out the three items of clothing, still on their hangers. “I’m afraid they’re none of them really suitable,” I said. “Sorry.” And I didn’t look at their faces as I went out of the shop, any more than I’ve gone back to see if it’s survived, or, if not, what’s taken its place.

No – I stick to charity shops now, where you know in advance that you’re mixing with dead people, and the choices you make are so clearly only for the moment, and don’t pretend to define what you are, but just what you want to be for that instant.

27 iii 2003 8pm – 11pm (first 500 words written at school earlier in the week)