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Hedley Twidle
FIRE
POOL
Experiences in an Abnormal World
KWELA BOOKS
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This is just a glimpse of my Experiences in an Abnormal World. I intend writing a Book if I ever have the opportunity, but medical attention is what I need at present.
Demitrios Tsafendas, Letter from Pretoria Central Prison
A History of Adverse Reactions
‘Oh – you’re the one who wrote the Dictionary.’
I often get this, when I run into someone who went to my school, or his parents.
Yes, I wrote the Dictionary. I have copy in front of me now, not the original but a reissue. It is a photocopied a5 booklet that was put together by a well-meaning teacher, long after I had left the all-boys boarding school where I lived through my body’s 13th to 18th years. This was 1992 to 1997 in world-historical time, so an era of major political and hormonal transitions.
During my final year, I conscripted a team of juniors and sent them out with notepads into the various boarding houses like 19th-century anthropologists, telling them to bring back exotic words and help me type them up. Perhaps because of the school’s physical isolation in the foothills of the Drakensberg (I speculate in the Foreword), ‘a very large and colourful body of indigenous terms has developed among its pupils’. In my last week at Milton College, I printed off a few hundred copies on the sly and sold them. The reissue was produced (I was told) when the one remaining original in the school library fell to bits through being consulted so often.
It is a highly embarrassing document.1 Not just because the revised edition includes a picture of me (with centre parting) on the cover and several of my schoolboy poems. The Dictionary, which I have only mustered the courage to revisit in preparation for writing this piece, is a deep core drill into a world of shame, anxiety, embarrassment – with generous servings of sexism, homophobia and bigotry. Adolescence, in other words, but adolescence in a particular place, and at a particular time. And the fact that everyone can’t see how embarrassing it is makes the whole thing more embarrassing still. The only time I have raised the matter myself was when I ran into one of my assistants, years after school.
‘Oh, you mean 1001 words for ‘homosexual?’ he said.
I let the subject drop. But now I am writing this to fill in everything between the entries that I so confidently recorded, thinking of myself only as the disinterested observer, when I was in it up to my neck.
Mainly, though, I want to write about skin.
Recently I saw a televised debate on whiteness during which a panellist (the daughter of a rich mining dynasty from Johannesburg) recited a poem called ‘Sorry for My Skin’. I want to take that title more literally, more clinically. I look at my skin and do feel genuinely sorry for it. Pity it, I mean: this organ that has clearly taken, and continues to take, such a beating from just being in the world. Flayed by the sun of course – sun is poison to white skin, if we are honest – but by all kinds of other traumas. For about ten years it felt like almost everything that could have gone wrong with my skin did go wrong. Call it a case of pityriasis, an embarrassing rash to go with all the others.
Eczema, dandruff, athlete’s foot – fairly common. But also: psoriasis, boils, seborrhoeic dermatitis. Scabies, from the Latin scabere: to scratch – nocturnal itchings caused by burrowing mites. Verrucae for which I needed a general anaesthetic to have that cut out of my heels. Even a real outlier like scombroid poisoning, caused by histamine that builds up in bad tuna, a food poisoning manifested not in the gut but in skin that is set aflame, redder than the worst sunburn. Sunburn, the worst, many times. Prickly heat, Dhobi’s itch, pruritis. More itching, ecstasies of itching, that self-worsening phenomenon that triggers the same neural pathways as chemical addiction. Writing some of the most important exams in my life with shoulders sunburned purple and ravenously itching thighs – it made something out of me. What? A materialist, I like to think, in a deep, philosophical sense. And then: acne.
But not just standard acne. ‘Cystic’ or ‘nodular’ or (even the terminology is unbearable) ‘conglobate’ acne. Acne conglobata. Acne vulgaris. A condition that, I contend, has not often been written about, a world-ending metamorphosis that has not found adequate literary expression.
At around age fourteen, trapped sebum and dead cells began to build underneath my skin, creating painful cysts. Not pustules or papules (though I had those too), but nodules. A pustule or papule offers the possibility of being squeezed and its contents voided from the skin. A nodule should not be squeezed: it is too deeply embedded. But at the same time, the longer it stays, the worse the scarring – irresolvable, Catch-22 acne. Acne that those who fret about lone pimples before a date (and isn’t most of the discourse around bad skin along these pseudo-Romantic lines?) just cannot understand.
‘Ah, I’m disgusting. Look at this big boy on my neck,’ my dorm mates would say, fussing around with creams, trying to ‘Oxycute’ the offending zit, going to bed with toothpaste dotting their faces. I looked on stoically, enduring the roundabout insult. Please, I thought. No local or topical remedy for me; no cosmetics or concealer sticks would help. My acne was structural.
To live in your body, to be conscious of your body, to be ‘present’ in your body – this is a good thing, yoga teachers and life coaches tell us. Breathing, being aware of our strengthening backs, large muscle groups aching deliciously after exercise – who would argue? But the kind of consciousness of the body I want to evoke here is something else. It is looking at a fingernail clipping, or the pile of hair on the floor of the salon, or the yellow armpit of a white shirt and thinking: what has this got to do with me? What has this got to do with my lovely brain and my important thoughts?
One of the first nodules appeared right between my eyebrows. I didn’t want to touch it, but I touched it all the time – in Afrikaans, through double maths – trying to work out how big it was, this egg of pain that had announced my imminent demotion from boy-king to red-bearded adolescent.2 Was it as big as my fingertips told me (grape), or as big as what I could see in the one small square of dormitory mirror (olive pip) that I crept up to in secret?
But nothing could be in secret; this was a private school with no privacy.
‘Got a rhino horn going there? Are you a fucking rhino now?’
You were forced to live through your body’s changes in full view of everyone, forced to shower together in communal showers where you best keep your gaze above waist height, so as not to be accused of ‘cock-spying’.
‘And if you piss, you piss at the urinals, where we can see you. Not the toilets, understand?’
A difficult contradiction to navigate, given that 1) you (and your cock) should be invisible,
