“I have heard of your paintings well enough. God gives you one face and you paint yourself another.” —Shakespeare, Hamlet

I am four years old and watching my mother paint. She lines her almandine eyes with liquid kohl in exotic strokes that flick outwards like giant check marks. Cleopatra is all the rage these days, and my mum fancies herself as a down-market Elizabeth Taylor. She squints into her dressing table mirror, fag hanging precariously from her lower lip (it will never fall). She doesn’t talk, I’m ignored: this is her ritual and hers alone. I’m not wanted in this holy of holies.

It’s Saturday and I’m up early, anxious to watch The Banana Splits and Tiswas on the telly. She’s making toast while I stare at her. Over the Nescafé and clinking sugar spoon, I realize something is different.

“How does mommy look without makeup?”

“Like a clown.”

The slap is like the report of a gun, sudden and deadly. I don’t understand. I only meant that she looks fresh-faced and lovely like the Pierette poster on my bedroom wall. In confusion, I run to the hallway mirror. The mark is bright pink. I stroke my cheek in dazed wonderment; now I’ve got makeup too.

In my hometown, a local expression for makeup is “slap.” Also “war paint.”

Even before I was born, Birmingham was universally recognized as a shithole. This birthplace of the Industrial Revolution is a dirty, polluted and hostile place. Its only saving grace is a thriving jazz scene. In the back lavs of the Futtrell Brothers’ nightclub, my mom gave Tom Jones a blow job. She taunts me with the fact that I am fat, bucktoothed and ginger-haired (“God forbid that bloody Irish blood”) and that I could never achieve this stardom. This is the Herculean feat of female triumph to which I am to aspire. I have no idea what she is talking about.

A sooty cake of glamour — this is the Max Factor mascara, and my mother will consider using no other. It comes in a marbled blue tray complete with a tiny brush. Mum spits heavily on the cake and scrubs with the brush to make a slick black paste and then paints laboriously on each eyelash. She separates the clumps with toothpicks as they dry. Five layers ensure plasticized strata, frozen starkly like unnatural spiders. Such slapdash glamour! Mum’s eyelashes could stab you to death.

When I am finally old enough to realize what had actually transpired between the Welsh singer and my mother, I am incredulous — not because of any sense of disgust or embarrassment, but because I can’t believe that she’d risk smearing those immaculate lips.

Once, when I am seven, my father goes to Paris for a business weekend. He hates travelling abroad only slightly less than he hates foreigners. When he returns, my brother and I ambush him, anxious for presents and exotic stories.He hadn’t seen much in Paris; he’d spent the entire weekend walking up and down the Champs Élysées, gesticulating wildly and speaking in a raised, haughty voice to every shopkeeper he encountered. He hands the spoils of his quest to my delighted mother: seven silver boxes, with filigreed roses, of my mum’s favourite French eyeliner. This is when I learn what true love is all about.

My father dies a year after we’ve all immigrated to Canada. Mum is only thirty-six; all the mourners comment on her beauty. There she stands, a damaged bird of paradise in the November sunshine, the wild prairie wind tearing through the cemetery and freezing her mascara into sooty icicles.

She comes to me in the dark one following morning before the birds start singing and finally speaks what we’d both known for years: “You ruined my life.” As her fingers tighten around my neck, I remain inert. What else could I do? She was probably right.

My brother calls the police but they believe her chat and avoid looking at the ring of blue-black bruises on my neck. Glancing around at the Capo-di-Monte sculptures and Rembrandt reproductions, they know they are out of their territory. There are far greater fish to fry on Erin and Toronto Streets among the hardened street girls, the druggies and the flips.

It’s the ’80s so I’m granted permission to look ridiculous. I wear garbage bags, white lipstick and paint my eyes sherbet yellow, satsuma orange and iridescent purple. My hair is pure sculpture, porcupine stiff with sugar water and Final Net. I terrify everyone. Only the elementary kids aren’t fooled. They chant “there goes the sunflower girl, the sunflower girl” whenever I pass the school gates. To stop myself from disappearing, I paint myself tall. It’s safer that way. The minute they start looking, they stop seeing.

Meanwhile, my bruises bloom like secret cancers. I read how-to beauty books with voracity. I learn all sorts of tricks of the trade: an old styptic wand of dad’s stops bleeding instantly; pure witch hazel takes the purple out of bruises; a thin layer of green eye shadow placed under concealer hides the red better.

I have become an artist.

Once she starts breaking bones, I leave home. I am seventeen.

When I am thirty-six, I decide to take a hiatus from teaching and return to the stage, my first true love. I appear in a local production as Eileen, a failed actress who can’t establish roots in Winnipeg. I can’t play Eileen as myself; it is too close for comfort. So I cover my long red hair with a short black wig, squeeze myself into a ridiculous black bustier and paint my eyes with sooty liquid eyeliner.

I prance around the stage with mock bravado and sluttish mischief; I lounge on couches with louche abandon and knock back wine glasses of white cranberry juice like an old pro. It is a resplendent transformation. I’ve learned from the best.

After each performance, I sit in the dressing room and scrub myself clean with Pond’s cold cream and a rough washcloth. My fellow actors always congratulate me on my performance, but I know that I’m nothing but a second-rate mimic, a palimpsest of pain and rage etched with myriad phantom woundings. When I look in the mirror, my eyes are always dead.

It’s early February when the man from the Salvation Army finally tracks me down to identify the body. There are things I need to do, arrangements I need to make. It should have been more straightforward but somewhere along the line, she’s hawked the prepaid burial plot. I hate the man’s expression of pity as he hands me the Ziploc bag. There’s not much in there, certainly a poor haul for such a life lived.

Amongst the torn books of matches, beer bottle caps and filthy dog-ends, there is a small cosmetic bag. There is a pair of blunt tweezers, a nub-end of a well-licked eyeliner pencil and a rancid tube of dime-store lipstick. It’s no good. I’ve got my own stuff anyway. Smoothing back her hair, I take out my bag and get to work.

It’s all I can do.

Victoria Louise McMahon’s great-grandmother was a white witch whose apparent specialty was contacting the dead. She finds this a fitting inheritance given that her own craft of writing fulfills the need to exorcise a number of quite nasty personal demons.

Vicky came to this country from the U.K with her family when she was in her late teens. It was a rough crossing.

Her first memory of writing was when she was a single mom on welfare: She’d scribble down ideas in an old school notebook whilst her baby took an afternoon nap. There was a quality of hope about those wintry afternoons that she is still trying to capture with her writing.

Proving her harshest critics wrong, she graduated, twice, with honors, and secured work as a high school English and Drama teacher. She also teaches Drama in Education at the University of Winnipeg where she’s allowed to indulge her passion for theatre and revel in its power to shape young lives.

Marjorie Anderson’s course on personal writing came into her life when she was at one of her lowest points ever. She credits Marjorie for renewing her faith in the writing process and for encouraging her belief in the power of her own stories.