un problema, i la xuple i hi ha un poc de sang, però no molta, així que sé que si ho feia ella es donaria compte del que estic fent, però ho vaig fer igualment – va ser un frenesí devorador, i al final ella va haver de fer que parara. It’s kind of ironic that today, you’re getting to see the internal me, and not the external me because at work people will only ever see the external me, and not the internal me. That’s the part of me I try to hide away all the time. I’ll give you a little bit of history about myself. I was born in London, both parents English. Mum English, Dad English. And that’s how I started out. I had to learn to lie from an early age. Life at home was never happy. My mum would often go out with other men behind my dad’s back when my dad was working at nights, which, as you can imagine, led to a lot of conflict. You’d go to school during the day, people see you, people look at you and you try to hide everything away, you don’t want to show, any pain. You don’t want to show what’s going on. So, you just try and do things at school. You try and carry on as normal. And then, at school you’re being bullied by people, because your parents are spending more money on alcohol than you, so your clothes are always second-hand, you get clothes from jumble sales, from what we call ‘down the WRVS’, and so you’re never as smartly dressed as the other kids. And so when you’d go to school you got bullied, and you’d go home and you wouldn’t tell your parents that you got bullied at school. And at school, you wouldn’t tell people that you got beat up at home by your parents. All came to a head one day when I was about four, five. I clearly remember it, still can see that dog. My dad bought a dog. A big Alsatian they called Rex. 73 And I remember they brought him one day, and I just saw this massive, huge dog, and for me it was something fantastic. And I still remember running up the hallway towards this dog, my mum screaming at me to stop, my dad trying to stop me, and I just grabbed hold of this dog and put my hands around its neck, and it started licking my face, and we became inseparable from then on, much to the point that my parents would let the dog sleep in my bedroom at night. Incidentally, I was locked into my bedroom, I wasn’t allowed out until they woke up, and obviously because they’d been drinking, I was always late for school. Get to school, the teachers would tell you off for being late. You didn’t tell them why you were late. You just apologise, you accepted it that it was you being bad, so you hid the lie that your parents were making you late. You didn’t want anyone to know. Then, this went on for a couple of years, then when I got about the age of six, my dad left home. My mum met a new guy. And that’s when things really went downhill. I used to get home from school, the dog would be there, and this dog hated this new guy. Every time this guy went near me, the dog would growl –wouldn’t let him anywhere near me at all. And then, just, one day I came home from school, and my dog wasn’t there. And I remember having this feeling, this really deep, drop feeling inside me, this sort of, a sense of foreboding that things were going to go really really bad. And whereas my dad, my real dad, hardly ever hit me, this new guy took to beating the crap out of me as often as he could. Really laying into me, beating me up. I remember one time being in the bath and he just grabbed hold of my head, and said ‘we’re gonna get rid of you for good’, and just held my head under the water, and I was struggling and struggling, and then he just let me up, and when I came up my mum had come into the bathroom, and he said he was playing. But I can’t forget that look in his eyes, I just can’t. And then another time we were out, I remember that he just picked me up –it was by the Thames, just me and him– and he just picked me up and threw me in. Somehow, heaven alone knows how, I managed to grab hold of a mooring rope on a barge, and just held on and some people came along, and he said I’d fallen in, I was running on the wall and fell in. And
Gillian Wearing
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