Masks

So. Autumn. Again.

You hear the laughter first. High-pitched, and just this side of hysteria. Then you hear a gloved hand on the door. They can’t reach the bell. They bang again – maybe two at a time. You hear the voices building and when you open it… you see four small, costumed figures, complete with scary faces. ‘Trick or treat!’ they chorus, triumphant, trying to play the part of monsters but unable to conceal the jubilant anticipation of sweets any longer…

The Halloween of 2009 saw a peak in the sales of costumes. Queues stretched along the rainy pavements of Ann Street as Belfast’s famous fancy dress shop, Elliotts, did record business. Maybe this was a reflection of the simple pleasures of recession fun: it might be too expensive to book a weekend away, but a silly costume for a Halloween party is much cheaper. Like in the nostalgic world of 1970s children’s TV character, Mr Benn, dressing up is simple escapism… step into the fitting room, try on a costume, and walk away, through the curtains on the other side, into a whole new world where adventures happen. Like Second Life, only safer – and, for one night only, real.

But maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe the masks of Halloween aren’t so very different to the masks we all wear, every day, at every time of year. A couple of weeks ago I’d had a particularly bad day. A monumentally bad day, actually: the sort of bad day that goes down in the annals of a personal history, filed under W for the Worst Days Of All Time. At lunchtime on that Bad Day, I managed to find ten minutes for a reviving coffee-and-biscuit break. Stepping into the relevant room, I met a colleague, who exclaimed, ‘Oh, you look very happy! It must be Friday! Must be nearly the holidays! You look like someone who doesn’t have a care in the world!’ All those exclamation marks hammered into my brain like hailstones, as I mumbled something incoherent and addressed myself to my coffee… but later on, I got to thinking that yes, I had pasted a fake smile on as I’d gone into the room, because yes, I did want just to drink my coffee and no, I didn’t want to talk about it… about what was really going on, how I was really feeling. Because I’d been living it, and with more to come, and I really did want to step outside my day for a ten-minute mini-break, not extend the agony by reliving it for an audience only too keen to itemise my failures.

I do this all the time. We all do, I think. Sometimes it’s just routine. The adjacency pairs of everyday conversation script emotional evasion for us.
‘How are you today?’ asks the GP.
‘Fine thanks… you?’ I reply, and then suddenly, embarrassingly, have to backtrack and explain the sore throat which has been my ticket to the surgery. In a close friendship or a partnership, it’s sometimes all in the tone of voice.
‘Everything ok?’
‘Fine…’ said with just that frisson of a bitter undertone which reveals that ‘fine’ is not a terribly accurate account of how things stand. You say this, like this, when you want the comment to be pursued… analysed… questioned. When you want someone to ask you whether you really are all right. It’s the opposite of that workplace moment, when you overact your fine-ness so much because you know that, as soon as someone shows concern, you’ll fall apart.

Maybe dressing up like trick-or-treating children, to go to a Halloween party, is just another way of pretending that everything’s fine. In the middle of a recession, in the middle of a gloriously dysfunctional life of being too busy, too stressed, too poor, too much in demand and too tired, becoming someone else for a night is just plain fun. It’s a way of stepping back into a simpler time in your life… a time when an unexpected sweet or piece of chocolate was the kind of incitement which made the fiction of dressing up and pretending to scare the neighbours at once believable and worthwhile. Nowadays, when we make preparations for the giggling, exuberant Halloween visitors, we have to take so many things into consideration: nut allergies, being friendly and not cross, but not so friendly that the inevitable parent hovering almost out of sight down the road won’t be suspicious, and making sure that the family dog or cat is well out of the way just in case its lurking presence might cause alarm or sneezing. When we do the J Alfred Prufrock thing, ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet’, it’s just the same. When I notice that I’m looking especially pale and drawn one day, I put on my broadest smile to greet colleagues… and then resent it just a bit when I’m overwhelmed with demands, requests, complaints. I blame them just a bit for not noticing the real person behind the mask… hiding in the fancy dress of competence.

As I write this, I can hear the rain of the second really bad November night, in a year which has just suddenly turned cold, hammering against the window of my study. I’m thinking of a warm scarf and a winter coat to help me face tomorrow morning, and an early night with a hot water bottle and a really good book. And maybe that’s as complicated as it gets, this business of masks? Maybe it isn’t really hiding. Maybe it’s just a case of being organised. Taking the projected attendant circumstances into consideration when preparing to face a day. A coat – a scarf – an umbrella. An iPod for a journey or a visit to the gym. A book to beat insomnia. Did you hear the one about the boy who took some hay to bed? It was to feed the night-mares…

No – as autumn edges to winter and I’m shocked all over again by just how dark the evenings are, and how early they begin, it seems to me that the truth about masks gleams with the small, fragile yet somehow utterly steady light of the pumpkin lantern which resists being extinguished in the chilly wind. It’s not just a case of the kind of evasive action born of a strong ethic of organisation, or the easy conversational routine of the utterances which we expect to go together. The masks, and the costumes, are there to reassure us that we fit where we’re supposed to be… that we can feel emotionally secure about not making ourselves conspicuous by seeming out of place. Does this equate to dishonesty? Maybe. Good manners? Undoubtedly. It’s no different to a dress code, in some ways… if the dress code states ‘smart casual’, it would seem churlish to turn up in scruffy jeans and top, as though for an evening at home. If the emotional code says ‘functioning, coping, confident’ – would we be in breach of some unwritten rule of etiquette to present a slightly less confident, slightly more broken version of ourselves?

‘I’m not from here. I’m from space!’ cried one of the little trick-or-treaters on my doorstep, although he later broke the spell he’d cast as, just as he turned to leave with his friends, he lifted his ancient wizard mask so I’d see who he was when he waved goodbye and said thanks (again) for the sweets. He was the precise opposite of the models of beauty on TV and in the best-selling magazines, all botox and tooth veneers and hair extensions. They advocate beauty products from their pedestals of perfection, ‘because they’re worth it,’ all the time swathed in an impossible aura to which the humbly imperfect can only aspire. In a world where a well-known anti-ageing cream is called Idealist, we can buy the mascara, but the models are styled with false lash inserts; buy the shampoo, but not afford the state-of-the-art extensions; smile to put a brave face on all our inadequacies, but probably not with the whitened perfection of a set of porcelain veneers.

As the darkness falls for winter, children hide their appealing innocence behind masks and costumes and tangled wigs, which turn them into wizened, unnatural creatures of supernatural aspect. As their straggled grey locks dance in the cold Halloween wind, the excited laughter of who they really are sneaks out now and then from behind their distorted faces to give the game away.

And as for the rest of us? We contort our faces into a rictus grin of ‘being fine’ as the icy winds of growing older in a hostile world make the innocent laughter of our own memories seem as wispy and illusory as a half-imagined ghost.



02-11-09