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Gillian Wearing

remember, a big argument that was going on and on, and my mum said to me that, if I hadn’t been born, then her and my dad would still be together. And as a backdrop to that, my mum once told me that she tried to leave me at the hospital and it was my dad that had to come and get me. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but that had quite an impact. And, so, I remember I just had to get out the house, I needed to be away from everything. And so I went out. I just had to get away from everything, I really did. And after about an hour of walking, just walking round and round and round, I just came across this guy and... I just went mad, I really really really went mad. And without provocation, without any, anything at all, I attacked him. And, it’s, it’s not something I’m proud of. It’s not something I’m happy with. It’s something that I have to get out of me. I actually beat this guy to death. I laid into him, despite him asking to stop, despite all the screams, the shouts, and everything, I ended up beating this guy to death. And then, and then... I remember getting home and not telling my parents, I didn’t say anything to anyone. And I remember seeing all this in the local papers about what had happened, and the newspapers were reporting it like –you know when you’re a kid and you find a porn magazine and you show your mates everything in it, and you’re like look at this, look at this... and all the little excitement– that seemed to be the same way the newspapers were reporting it. Like, just excited little kids over something that they couldn’t grasp with, but hey, it was exciting and we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. And I remember, looking at all that and just, trying to keep everything away from everyone, not telling anyone anything. Eventually, like about two weeks later, I got picked up by the police. Just a random stop and search. And they got me at the scene of the crime with a boot print. And so my fate was sealed. I was on remand in prison for nine months before my trial. And, rather bizarrely at court, I remember my mother turning around and saying that she’d seen me the following morning with blood all over me. I confessed to it, and at the age of 16 I was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. I went to prison. I did 13 years. In prison, I suppose quite near to the end of my sentence, I joined a pen-pal magazine. And, just 75 one person in my life, just one person at that time, a girl I was writing to, I got really close to her and told her everything about me, and she didn’t, like, run off. She didn’t judge me or condemn me or anything like that. Stood by me, through thick and thin. For all the times I was alone, for, the three or four people while I was in prison I had seen try to commit suicide, two of them successful. And when I came out of prison, we got married. Had a beautiful baby boy. The trouble was, this person who I really am, this person inside of me, I couldn’t reveal to her. I had no control over money, I couldn’t stop spending. And so I got us into debt, you know, it wasn’t a secure life for her. We had a son who was the most precious thing in this world. And that gets really..., I drove her away from me. I drove my son away from me. And so she left –went back to her own country. So now, I don’t really have friends I would call friends. Yes, I have acquaintances, there’s people I know, there’s people I talk to. But they’re not my friends. I go to work, I’ve got a job. The difficult thing about getting a job in my position is that you always have to declare that you have a criminal offence. And you can imagine that if you go to a job and you start telling people about what you’ve done, you ain’t going to get the job, no one in this world is going to employ you. Add to that, I’ve got no qualifications whatsoever. It’s like, I go for a job interview, all suited and booted, and I sit there, and I lie about qualifications that I’ve got. I think of the basic ones, like, maths, English, religious education, and stuff like that, and I pretend that I have these qualifications. I make up schools, I make up colleges that I’ve been to, and I take it from there. So I go there, I’m all nice and polite, and... and they really think the sun shines out of my arse when I talk, believe me. And, so I get the interview, I get the job. I go to work, and it’s, the funny thing is, believe it or not, I work in customer service, which is resolving issues for people, so when people phone in, you have to be really nice, you have to be really polite to people. And, they think I’m so wonderful, they think I’m so fantastic, this person, that I am, I talk to them, I resolve their issues, I try and go out of my way, I really do bend over backwards to help people. And, I wonder what they’d think if they knew the real me. When you go through to someone at a call


Gillian Wearing
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