This Vain World - I have a slight cruel streak!

This Vain World

Workmen had been working on scaffolding on the side of the University for quite a few months. They were engaged in cleaning the Ashby Building and it was amazing to see the grey-blotched facade buffeted into a white clean smoothness. Every day as the transformation takes place, I look with envy and wonder if human faces could be rejuvenated with equal success. 

The gesturing workmen make odd noises in my direction, a kind of caterwauling with ‘all-rite-darlin’ somewhere in the midst. In my early twenties such calls would have engendered righteous indignation and anger at the ability of a group of humans to humiliate one of their own species on the grounds of sex.

Specifically, memories of my first job, with an electronics firm on the Isle of Wight as an assistant engineer come back vividly. The firm had taken on thirty new graduates, twenty-eight men and two women, and after a six-week induction course we had begun to form a sense of identity and confidence. My bubble burst on the seventh week when I had to go to the shop floor to check on some dimensions of equipment there.

My entrance into the grinding, hissing environment was greeted with all kinds of calls and whistles and I froze. I, who had delved into quantum mechanics, general relativity, microelectronics and vacuum technology with relative ease, found suddenly that I’d forgotten how to walk never mind speak. Suddenly, I was reminded that the only really important thing about me was my sex. 

It was as if you’d searched for a noble truth in human expression for many years and finally been told that actually the answer lay in page 3 of The Sun! Walking haltingly across the shop floor I felt as if my sexual organs had all grown. It was as if my breasts were dragging on the ground, the weight of them like huge whales being beached. You know those nightmares where you find you’ve forgotten to put your clothes on, in such unlikely situations as the local supermarket?

Well, that had been my feeling then, but a decade and three children later a different response is felt. When you are a mother you disappear. No, seriously, I wonder no one ever comments on it. When you have a buggy and a small child you become a non-person. Not only are you ignored by society but also everything is deliberately made difficult, to ensure you stay at home indoors. Buses, libraries, public buildings etc. all view you with distaste. 

Ever tried to have a dentist, doctor’s appointment with small children and you will know how implacable the hatred there is for women with small children in our society. Having experienced that rejection of one’s very existence, even a whistle from an overweight lorry driver can be viewed in a positive light. The caterwauls from the hanging walkways are a form of recognition. One, that I am a woman and two, that I might be considered attractive.

Okay, if the platforms were a little lower they would have questioned the latter, but in any event, I wave back. Motherhood has the effect of clothing one’s nature in a benevolent nurturing glow. Why hurt feelings, why be hurt, let’s just get on with life, eat your apple, drink your milk. Sexual organs become mechanical appendages that are required for a specific purpose.

I go inside the swing doors and enter the lift, which will take me to my tenth floor office. It is a peculiarly designed building, the Ashby. Housing the Engineering Department, it has toilets on every floor. Unfortunately, the only women’s toilets are found on the 7^th, 3^rd and ground floor. When the 7^th floor toilets were out of order for a few months I became sick and tired of the daily tour to find a suitable toilet. Especially when I had to go for an operation and subsequently seemed to bleed consistently for two months. A real bleeding nuisance! 

At exactly that time the Equality Unit in Queens University sent round an amazing little document about language. Don’t use the words manhole, mankind, policeman etc., as these are considered offensive. Being one of the few women in the department I received a lot of teasing and goading about this publication. I remember thinking as I drudged to that third floor toilet, bleeding like a stuck pig, call me Bill, Ben or Bob but please provide us with adequate basic facilities.

Unlike the outside, the inside of the building is scoured and abused. Paint peeling off and grubby blackened windows keep out the sunlight. Everywhere that feeling of neglect. The contrast with the newly restored facade outside reminds me of something my Sunday school teacher had said when I was very young. Mrs Roberts was elderly, sweet, and looked as every grandmother should. The subject for discussion was vanity and try as she did, we children could not grasp the meaning of this sin. Dressed up to look nice on the outside while inwardly dirty was her first attempt, but since all of us had been ‘dressed up’ in our Sunday best and yet inwardly had all kinds of unpleasant thoughts, that somehow failed to engender any measure of real naughtiness. We children were constantly dressed up despite all kinds of inner defects and it was usually by our parents. How could that be so wrong? 

Getting flustered she used an analogy: vanity is like a shop. A sweet shop, she said, full of beautiful sweet boxes, but when you go in to buy some sweets you realise they are all just for display and that there is not one sweet in the whole shop. For some reason that struck us all as a dirty horrible sin. To lure one with sweet nice chocolates and things and then have nothing at all inside. 

The horror caused a momentary stunned silence in our class and even now a quarter of a century later vanity still strikes me as an enormous sin. Our building’s outer cleanliness and inner dirt was just such vanity. Mrs Roberts would have raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips in disapproval.

I am in the lift and the lights that tell you which floor you have stopped at no longer work. The lift stops at the second floor and a bespectacled figure hugging a briefcase creeps cautiously in. We are alone in the lift together and I sense his panic rising. 

It is an amazing thing that there are brilliant minds in science which have forced back the frontiers of human knowledge, but who also have the social skills of a goldfish. This guy is one of them. His fear arises from the close proximity of a human being to whom he might have to say something or who may, God forbid, say something to him. The sweat breaks out on his brow and he studiously avoids eye contact. 

An informal ‘good morning’ would have put him out of his misery, as he would have been able to stutter good morning back bringing to an end the uneasiness of the moment. I perversely hold out no such hand of kindness; if he cannot master the rudimentary social skills, I am not inclined to help. The lift stops with a lurch and Dr Goldfish’s hysteria moves up a notch. 

His eyes are frantically scanning the floor lights, trying to determine what floor we have stopped at. In a choked stutter he turns and asks ‘Where am I?’ His panic is total hence his cry for assistance. He thinks this may be his floor but is unsure. The uncertainty principle is an acceptable feature of Physics but in the real world, certainties should be there to console one. There should be a light on one of the ten numbers above the lift door and the fact that none of them are on, has thrown him into a miscarriage of communication. 

He is looking at me now, hoping for an end to all his misery. I choose not to give it; motherhood has its cruel phases too. “As in life?” I query, as if his question is a fundamental statement of his need to know his position in the grand scheme of things. 

His eyes protrude, at the thought that he might have strayed not only into the shallows of basic communication but also into the dark murky waters of the meaning of his life. He presses the door open button and throws himself out, obviously deciding that if he’s on the wrong floor, flights of stairs would be preferable to sharing a lift with me. The door closes and the lift sails on to the tenth. I permit myself a smile, it’s good to be alive.