Geoff Thompson: Writer – Teacher – Martial artist

Let me give you a snapshot of my youth; I’m kissing a girl in the farmer’s field. I know what an erection is and I know how it feels because I have one now, but I have no idea what to do with it. Not here in the feild with Julie, not even at home in the privacy on my own bed. I am thirteen years old and the innocence is bliss, like Eden before the fall. She is gorgeous, a tide of blond hair lapping down her back, that smile, those eyes, a face so perfectly made that it sets a tingle in my belly that I can still feel in recall thirty seven years later. She has marked my name on the knee of her jeans in blue ink and linked it to her own name with an arrow and a heart so I know this is love. I lean in to kiss Julie again, the excitement is palpable, she is thirteen years old and I have never liked a girl this much before. But before our lips can join I recoil with horror as her beauty twists and contorts into the unshaven face of a thirty year old man.

This is not the first time that I find myself jolted back in time, it has happened a lot lately. It has happened a lot since the abuse and it is making me fearful of being alone with a girl. Actually, it is making me fearful of being alone, full stop, fearful not just of what others might do to me in the dead of night, but afraid of what I might do to myself when that historical shadow envelops me, as it always envelops me, and I start abusing myself.

As a child your brain is still plastic, it is easily moulded and scarred by strong experiences. When images and suggestions and incidents are planted in your mind while the cells are still impressionably fertile, those seeds will bring a future harvest, a hideous triune of pain and fear and sadness.

Another snapshot, from two years before; I am eleven. I am camping in a make-shift bed at the local Boys Club, everyone is sleeping where they can, lots of kids, lots of instructors. It’s safe. My dad even came down to the centre to make sure. He can stay over, he told my mum, they’re nice people at that boys club.

So I stayed over. But as it turned out they were not so nice after all, those monsters in people suits. It wasn’t my dad’s fault, he was not to know. He did his best, he was thorough, he came down after the pub and he pissed in their toilet and he shook hands with people and he said Geoffrey you’ll be safe there. He was thorough enough to settle my mum’s mind, and mine was already set.

Later that night; I’m the teachers pet so I get my own room, ‘you’re special,’ he told me. I was thrilled. Special! Me? Apparently my idea of special and his idea of special were entirely different, and if I’d have known that then….well, if I’d known what special really meant and how being special was going to fuck my life for the next twenty years I might have stayed in my own bed and never left my mum’s apron strings again. I certainly would not have begged her to let me camp out at the club because the other boys were.

As it turned out my own room was away from prying eyes, ‘where things are not so cramped.’ The teacher sleeps here too, and another male instructor, and of course it feels a bit wrong but this is my first night away from mum, I’ve only been on the planet for 134 months, I’ve just started big school so pretty much everything is brand new to me and every experience feels a bit strange, I am not old enough yet to fully understand my own feelings. And anyway I trust him. Actually I don’t trust him, trust does not even come into this equation, I idolise the man. So I sink my instinct easily below a fledgling wisdom like a stone and I pay for my folly later, when the night is blackest and the cold creeps along my plucked-chicken skin on the heavy fingers of abuse, searching though my thin protection for something virginal to pillage. In a long dark night of the soul I suffer the heinous trinity of murdered innocence, bludgeoned trust and a hideously crippled self esteem; my mind crawled from that bastard place like a war cripple, and I, wounded, stole quietly back into a childhood with my shadow-shame draped over me like a leper’s blanket. I didn’t tell a living soul for fear of consequence, and perhaps fear of more abuse from those that judge, and in my mind I told God to go and fuck himself. He didn’t save me. I was just a boy and he didn’t save me, so he could fuck off.   When I went to bed in that place I was eleven years old. When I woke up the next day I was a hundred.

I didn’t just blame God of course, I also blamed myself. This was not verbalised at the time, but I did place most of the responsibility squarely on my own shoulders. It happened because I was unworthy (I told myself) it was my fault because I was a puff (the kids at school called me ‘a queer’ because I looked like a girl), I got abused because I was ‘a slimy little cunt’ (to paraphrase a close family member when he was pissed). I think that’s why I was so hard on myself later, in the unfolding years, when I lived a normal life in public, but quietly and violently dismantled myself in private.

For many years after the fall my mind was in distress, it was confused and compromised and it was a full time job holding back the tsunami. I was lucky enough to still have a mind but it was distorted somewhat, you might say that it was broken and leaking and because I did not know how to fix myself and I was too ashamed to ask someone else to fix me I turned in on myself, like a root-bound plant tangled and choking in its own soil. Well, the energy had to go somewhere, and if not out then where? I started to self abuse, although at the time I would not have labelled it thus. I hurt myself physically, some times sexually or emotionally, but always violently. I found some relief on brick walls that got between me and my quiet rage, I smashed my knuckles off the brick and mortar until the bones were bulbous, the skin tore and flapped and the blood oozed out a little of my agony. Other times my pain made the shape of overwhelming lust and I hunted the dark places for relief in unrealisable pleasure, raping and thraping my body – against my better will – sometimes until I bled, and then I spent till the next time bubbling under my own skin with shame. More times the abuse was emotional, bullying myself into the corner of a fragile mind, taunting my mirror image with sub vocalised savagery and I self hated myself into endless rages and depressions that plummeted nine circles deep. As a young adult my legacy spilled into relationships where I unconsciously adopted bullying and cruel abuser-surrogates, some times they were lovers, other times friends or work colleagues, often they were complete strangers – my broken magnet attracted one and all, and I loved and hated them in equal measure. I abandoned them (before they could abandon me) in valiant victory marches, only to trudge back again after my valour had worn off, like a sycophant with my white handkerchief flying from a surrender flag. And I always feared that they would sexually betray and abandon me and my prophesy was self fulfilling because some of them did. Some didn’t, but in my mind none of those bastards could be trusted, because my trust was a fleshless skeleton buried in that boys club back in 1972.

If it was not teenage girl friends transmuting into abusive men in the farmers field, it was the frightening visitations of overwhelming and perverse fantasies that demanded to be acted out; they frightened and inhabited me like possessing demons.

Later, bone tired of living under dominion, I went to war with these forces, I fought a pitched and bloody battle for the sovereignty of my body and mind. I built an armoured physique by labouring with brick and mortar on muddy building sites, I developed a sinewy mentality and learned to kill people with my bare hands in exotic and dangerous martial arts, I even took those skills and placed myself into nightclubs and bars and pubs and split the flesh and spilled the blood of anyone that dared to step into my world. I was boot deep in mud, knee deep in blood and neck deep in violence. And once again I was lost. If you’d have seen me then you would have been forgiven for thinking ‘what good can come of this savage man?’ I felt the same myself at eleven; what good can now come of this broken boy? And as a nervous, depressed and angry self abuser I often wobbled on that thin precipice of sanity and thought ‘how did I come to this place?’

I can tell you honestly that good did come of that abused boy, that disturbed and nervous youth and that dangerously violent man, and because good came of me I know that good can come of any man, good can come of all men, no matter where their pain, no matter what their sin. What I showed you and what I saw in those snap shots of time were simply that, snap shots. It was who I was in that moment, but it is not, it never was and it never will be who I truly am now.

Sitting here in my wonderful life, nearing fifty years of age I am transported back across four decades of time, and I can still access that wild cocktail of screaming emotions. Maybe one day I will atone them all and become absolute, or perhaps I will always remain a host to the many errors and sins and scars that my body holds, those small bundles of death. Either way I don’t mind. I am a man at peace with his past, his present and his future. I am at peace with myself and I am at peace with life. I am no longer that young innocent lying under the weight of disturbed and unbalanced abusers. And I am not a teenage boy with untamed and fearful imaginations, neither am I the young adult male searching for salvation in all the wrong places, acting out the perennial wrongs of my past. I am a powerful man now. I am formidable. I have five decades of internal warring behind me and I know about pain and let me tell you, if life wants to confront me with its piddling slings and arrows it would be in grave error, because it would not be bumping bones with Geoff Thompson, it would be bumping into the entire fucking universe, because the God that I eschewed as a boy I have embraced as a man, and everything that he is, I am. I have become the sovereign of the only kingdom that holds any power for me in this swelling universe, and that kingdom is the kingdom of me. I am not who I am despite my past, I am who I am because of it and for that I will always be very grateful. I have learned that every single experience has divinity in it, and because of that everything that happens to me is not only good or great or fantastic, everything that happens to me is out of this world.

Be Well.

Geoff Thompson