Marina Character Analysis

I don’t know what I am doing here.

Well, I do, really. It’s because I was getting nowhere at the hospital. I have been sent here to learn to talk again. Sent here because my mother can’t stand my silent presence at home. Sent here because of my face, I suppose. I don’t know.

And my father has found his way into this journal already, when I was so determined that I wasn’t going to think about him ever again, much less write about him. He’s too powerful still, like a radioactive cloud, finding his dark way into everything. I wonder what it’s like where he is? Kind of like here, maybe. Having to line up, always being ordered around, no privacy, no freedom, no flares lighting up the future, showing which way the curves bend, and where are the exits. Perhaps he doesn’t talk either… I mean, I suppose he speaks to people and they speak to him, but it might be just empty, just mechanical words.

There is only one question she really wants answered and that is the question she cannot bring herself to ask: “Have you started talking yet? Or are you still my daughter, the silent freak?”

Tonight Sophie used me as a ventriloquist’s doll. She came up behind me as I sat at my desk waiting for Prep to start. She put her hands up the back of my sweater and moved me around as though I were a puppet, speaking for me in a funny voice. Most of the girls laughed, some more than others. Finally a girl called Lisa Morris told her to stop.

I wanted to call out warnings to them, to sit at the top of a lighthouse in the middle of the lawn and scream: “DON’T TRUST THEM! LOOK OUT! THEY HATE YOU! THEY HATE EVERYONE! THEY HATE EACH OTHER!” Yet I knew that for a few of them that wasn’t necessarily true; they lived in a strange foreign world of love, that I envied but could not understand—and would never enter.

Sometimes, someone’ll come in when I’m there, but they usually don’t see me, because I sit at the side, in the darkest places. And they’re mainly people I don’t know anyway. But last night Lisa Morris came in and sat there for about an hour. (At least she’s come down from her tree. Maybe she’s following me around.) Then, this afternoon, when I first went in, Emma was there. That surprised me because she always seems so cheerful. Maybe cheerful people like to sit in chapels too. Maybe she’s religious. Maybe everybody gets down sometimes. I don’t know.

I’m sorry about yelling at you. I was in a foul mood after science, because Hardcastle virtually accused me of cheating. It wasn’t anything you did. I’m sorry—I think you’re nice and I want to be friends.

—Cathy

It’s about twenty minutes since she sent it to me. I cannot look at her. I cannot move. I have spent the whole time with my head down, looking at this page. Now I have just started writing again. I want to die or hide or run away. I am scared to look at her. I can handle, have handled, most things in my life, but not this.

Ann had a ceramic piece that she’s made herself on the cupboard beside her bed. It was a big bird, an eagle, in shades of brown, and it was very beautiful. She’s so artistic. This morning I was vacuuming the dorm, which was my job before inspection, and I tripped over the vacuum cleaner and fell into the cupboard and knocked the statue to the floor, where it broke. It was awful—oh God, it was awful! I write about it so calmly, but inside I wanted to die. I went outside; I felt as though all the color had gone out of my skin, out of my body. I couldn’t go back to the dorm. All day I wanted to kill myself; I thought of all the different ways I could kill myself, for the thousandth time in my life. How could I be so clumsy and stupid? And to Ann, who’s always been so nice?

Yesterday we had to draw an abstract self-portrait, a kind of symbolic thing, then explain it to the rest of the class. It’s amazing what people said. Lisa Morris drew a whole lot of pale pastel colors but they were split in half with a vivid jagged gash, like a bolt of lightning. She wouldn’t talk about it, though. Cathy drew a person—herself—being forced along a kind of tunnel by a lot of gray shapes. She said they were like her teachers and parents and stuff. “And other students?” Mr. Lindell asked. Cathy said “Yes” to that. But the fascinating thing for me was the number of people, like Cathy, who drew things showing them on their own and with various pressures on them, feeling isolated, with the group against them. I wonder if they know what isolation really means?

Last night’s film was Raiders of the Lost Ark. I hadn’t seen it before; I guess I was the only one who hadn’t. Quite early in the movie a man grabs a red-hot emblem, not knowing it is hot, and the design of the emblem is burnt into his hand…. How hard it is to write these words…. I ran out of the hall across to the garden and hid behind a tree. […] But Cathy came after me and put her arms around me and held me. I shook and fluttered and shook. She was crying! I felt with amazement the salt tears on her cheeks in the darkness. I broke free and ran away, back to the dorm, and hid in the bathroom, where the lights were safely out. […] and worse than anything, I could smell his skin burning; there in the hall I could smell it.

I dreamed last night that I was on a kind of hill, a little dark knoll, and some people, I’m not sure who, brought me a huge white sea monster they had found, all dredged up for drowned, so wet and bloated and dead. Yet gradually, as I touched it, it came to life and thinned down and color and warmth and life came to its own body. Then we went for a walk and after a while we came to a lake, which it slipped into, and, sort of saying good-bye to me, swam away. I was sorry to see it go, yet 1 knew it was right that it should, so it could be alive and independent.

As for me, it’d be a strange boy who’d be interested. And I would be scared to death to have anything to do with a boy. But sometimes I dream, only in the dreams it’s not really me anyway. It’s too complicated. Sex is so complicated. I wish no one had ever invented it in the first place. What a mess it’s made of my mother’s life, for instance. It’s dark and threatening and yet it’s powerful and draws people toward it. No one looking at me would think of it. But yes, I long to be held and touched, like everyone else.

It took only a few moments to work out why it looked familiar, because I suddenly found myself outside the Family Court buildings. That was where it all started. Oh, it didn’t all start there of course but it was the place that brought it all to a head. It was the judge’s ruling in that big gleaming building, giving my mother so much of everything and custody of me, that sent my father so totally off his brain. I felt a bit sick standing there. I wonder yet again how much of it was my stupid fault; how much the things I said to the judge had influenced the case. Guess I didn’t like my father much at that stage of my life.

Mr. Lindell, I want to come back to school like everyone else at the start of term next week. I think it is the best place for me. I know I don’t talk, but I have other voices, like writing in my journal. I have started to like Warrington, and if I don’t go back there, then what is to become of me?

I am sorry about writing to you but I need help.

I still don’t know what to do about him—about my father, I mean. I don’t think I could ever visit him. But sometimes I think about writing him a letter. I don’t imagine anyone else is going to. A couple days ago, at home, I was reading a newspaper and there was an article in it about some guy who was being sentenced for bashing his little kids, and it said that men who’ve hurt children get a really bad time in prison from the other prisoners. I went to the bathroom and threw up. I can’t stand to think of him in there on his own, getting punished so badly and feeling so desperate.

It’s funny about a face, how big a difference it makes. I mean, one day you look in a mirror and you think, yeah, that’s me, that’s my face. And then another day you sneak out of your room, when the nurses are at tea, and you find a bathroom and go in and look in the mirror (you have your hands over your eyes but you peep through your fingers) and you think, that’s not me, that’s not my face. So am I my face? I mean, is that all I am? I don’t know the answer to that but I do know that, because part of my face is changed, I’m not the person I was before. I’m a different person. I don’t know who, but a different one. Once I tried to tell myself that it’s who you are inside that counts, but that didn’t work too well because I knew I’d changed inside anyway.

I took a thick felt pen and drew a picture on her nicely painted wall. To her credit she didn’t even blink. It was like the picture I’d been drawing on the beach, a head behind bars. “Is that your father?” she asked, quite gently, but I shook my head. “Is it you?” and I shook my head again. I couldn’t figure out any way to show her but after a while she got it anyway. “Is it both of you?” and I nodded.

Something funny happened today—well, not funny, strange. I went into the bathroom and Sophie was staring at herself in the mirror and with her teeth clenched she was saying to herself: “I hate you, you creep, you bitch.” It was like she was saying it over and over again, but then she saw me standing there and she ran off crying.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I started talking and did play a full role in the life of the dorm. They’d all have to readjust to accommodate me, the new me, but I don’t think they’d like it very much. In a way, everyone’s comfortable with how it is.

Just realized I haven’t heard from my mother at all this term, except for my birthday. And I hadn’t even noticed. But Cathy got a letter from her mother saying that she’d fixed it for me to go to the Preshills’ for midterm break. Looks like these decisions are being made for me. I don’t know if I want it or not.

“Marina!” he said.

“Hello, Dad,” I answered.

Everything was still, the air swollen. My father, who never hugged, put his arms awkwardly around me. He felt bony and tight, but I knew this was hard for him. I held him as well as I could, wanting to say everything. We were both crying, I think. People were watching, and I was embarrassed, but I didn’t want to let him go. We’d come quite a way to have this hug: it looked like a long one.

I cleared my throat and tried again: “I’ve got so much to tell you….”