Girl in the Dark (14 page)

My nose quests after it, drawn forwards like the snout of a dog, yearning to suck in the freshness, to hoover it up like cocaine. It is overwhelming, unutterably tantalising. I stagger, intoxicated. Then I turn back to my darkness, and must smell, for a few moments before my nose adjusts, the staleness, the inferiority, the used-up air of my prison.

Pete goes to Cornwall for a few days to take photographs of rocks, cliffs and the sea. He returns with an extraordinary animal as a present for me. It is a sheep
made of a white silky hairy material, with hooves of golden plush. Its brown glass eyes bear a wonderfully benign expression. It wears a small patterned bow tie. But its most striking features are its exceptionally long and flexible hind legs, which allow it to do the splits, both front-to-back and sideways, with ease. The sheep is designed to keep out draughts by doing the splits across the bottom of doors. Pete has bought it for me as a light excluder for my dark room, to replace the unattractive sausage of yellow and brown checked fabric that somebody found in an attic, and that I have been using up until now.

When I am given the sheep, I am completely overcome. I can’t stop laughing, but I am also close to tears. Into my horribly limited life Pete has still found a way to bring wit and joy and silliness. The sheep, even in the most undignified and eye-watering positions, retains its air of benevolent serenity. At first this leads us to name it “Stoic,” but the name doesn’t stick. In the end it becomes simply “Long-legged Sheep,” and it lives splayed across the threshold of my dark room, an unobtrusive, conscientious guardian. Its presence gives rise to a strange phrase, possibly unique to these peculiar circumstances, never requiring articulation by any other human tongues. “Always replace the sheep,” I remind my visitors, because it is inevitably shoved out of the way when they come through the door of my room. “No problem,” the visitor says, reaching down into the dark and rearranging the hairy, flexible limbs.

Spontaneous removal of clothes on the living-room floor is a thing of the past. To make love now, Pete and I require Procedures.

First we must wait until nightfall. Then, before he comes into my black room, Pete switches off the lights in the rest of the house, closes curtains, shuts doors, banishes any stray photons that might fall on naked flesh. Then he must find his way to my lair. He has become better at this, less likely to end up in the airing cupboard, or bash into the bookcase as he comes through the door.

I reach out to touch him once he is inside the room. I wriggle past him to lay the sheep along the bottom of the door. Then I wriggle back, stand up with my body against his, and take him in my arms.

Now we can get down to business. “James Bond never had these difficulties,” grumbles Pete, as he struggles to grasp the operating principle of an unfamiliar fastening by touch alone.

“Hmm,” I say, having unbuttoned him, “I thought I was getting somewhere, but you appear to be wearing a vest.”

Once, in the early days, we knocked our heads together so hard that we both saw stars. Pete has ground his elbow into my eye; on another occasion, I punched him on the jaw and his head hit the wall beside the bed. It is a single bed, and we have also fallen out of it, both jointly and severally.

At Pete’s place of work, there is a big campaign to eliminate “lost time accidents.” Employees are showered with leaflets exhorting them not to run on the stairs, and to look both ways before they cross the road. Pete and I wonder what a risk assessor would make of our activities. Would he ban them outright, perhaps, or insist on the wearing of hard hats? The trick, we have discovered, is to make sure the other person always knows where your head is. So we talk more, or make sounds. This also helps to make up for the absence of facial expressions indicating ecstasy, boredom, delight, etc.

I worry less now about noise; with the window shrouded in layers of blackout, it is unlikely that anyone will be able to hear.

Tonight there is a competition at the camera club on the theme of “British Nature.” Pete comes into my dark room, and sits on the bed beside me to tell me about it.

“All the people who like taking pictures of insects will come out of the woodwork,” he predicts. “There will be lots of close-ups of long-bodied chasers, and that sort of thing.”

A long-bodied chaser is a kind of dragonfly. “What are you going to enter?” I ask.

Pete is more into landscape than nature, so he will not have a lot of choice. On his camera he shows me a very fuzzy highly abstract close-up of indeterminate green
things, shimmering against a darker background—for a short time my skin can tolerate these slideshows in miniature, these private illuminations.

“What on earth is that?” I ask.

“It’s beech leaves,” he says indignantly, “in the spring.”

“But it’s completely out of focus.”

“It’s supposed to be out of focus. That’s Art, that is.”

“If that gets anywhere in tonight’s competition,” I say, “I shall be extremely surprised.”

“Right,” he replies. “Do you want to have a bet on that?”

I love bets. He knows I won’t be able to resist. In the life before, I bet on all sorts of things—on the outcome of general elections, on who would win Wimbledon, on whether there would be snow before Christmas. Usually my bets were with friends and family—only once with Ladbrokes, when I was unable to get satisfaction elsewhere. A bet is a tribute to the unknowability of the future, an act of faith that the course of events may be probable, but is never fully determined. More than ever, now, I need them, I need that itch of hope.

“OK,” I say, “let’s have a bet. If that gets anywhere in tonight’s competition, I’ll … I don’t know, what should the stake be?”

“After what you’ve said about my fine image, I think you should abase yourself.”

“Hmm, that’s a new one. OK, if you win, I undertake to abase myself. What about if I win?”

“I’ll get us fish and chips at the weekend.”

“Right. It’s a deal.”

Pete goes off to camera club. I pass the evening in the company of Agatha Christie, restlessly shifting position, trying to resist doing what would be most comfortable and natural, which would be to lie down on the bed. Finally I push the button on my little alarm clock and a small light illuminates its face. I see with relief that it is ten o’clock. I get washed, undressed and climb under the quilt.

At half past ten Pete knocks on the door and wakes me from my doze. “Hello,” I say sleepily. I have forgotten all about our bet.

“Well, darling,” he says, kneeling down beside my pillow, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to abase yourself. My picture was highly commended.”

“WHAT?” I roar, shooting upwards out of the bed. “But that’s outrageous. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“What on earth was the judge thinking?”

“The judge was a highly discerning individual with excellent taste.”

“Well, really,” I snort. “That’s completely bonkers.”

“Perhaps he was glad to see something that was not a long-bodied chaser. Anyway, I still win.”

“OK, OK, I’ll do something about it tomorrow.”

Actually, as it turns out, I do something about it sooner than that. Despite my efforts to mark out a boundary between day and night, to persuade my body of a qualitative difference between similar periods of blackness, I wake, as so often, in the empty early morning, and cannot find sleep again.

I decide to compose a “Song of Self-Abasement,”
and it absorbs and infuriates me, for hours. I push and shove words into lines, but they refuse to fit, bulging uncontrollably in the middle or drooping unaesthetically off the ends.

I am on the point of giving up when there is an audible “click” inside my head and suddenly everything has fallen into place. My words are standing neatly to attention, and none of them is mucking about. I open my eyes wide with surprise, and recite the whole thing through twice, to make sure I am not imagining it:

I smile to myself in the darkness, and sleep slips over me at last, like a smooth incoming tide.

Some people believe that illness is a corporeal metaphor for the condition of the psyche. In their eyes, a
problem in the back indicates an inability to put the past behind one; a failure to process old emotion manifests in constricted bowels.

It is my misfortune to have a condition which is peculiarly susceptible to metaphor. I prove irresistible to those of a vaguely New Agey turn of mind; they become tremendously excited when they hear about me. Here is something they have not come across before, surely a metaphorical manifestation par excellence. To cut oneself off from society, to insist on living in the dark in a sealed-up room—it is almost too perfect. Clearly I am terrified of human contact, indeed, afraid of life itself, desiring subconsciously to reverse the event of my own birth, and retreat to the dark close quarters of the womb.

What a fascinatingly damaged psyche! What I must do is
work on myself
(somehow, in the dark, on my own) and
address my outstanding emotional issues
(if I could work out what these were, apart from a frustrated desire to get out of the dark).

A reiki healer comes to see me, recommended by a friend. I lie on my bed and the healer moves her hands over me. It is pleasant and relaxing, until the metaphors kick in.

“I wonder,” says the healer, “when you’re in the light, do you feel … exposed?”

“Exposed?”

“Open to people’s gaze, lots of eyes looking at you.”

“What I feel is, I’d better get out of this light before I have a painful skin reaction,” I say, “which, given my experience, is a pretty rational response.”

More work is done on my chakras. I drift into a dreamy meditative state.

“And your partner,” says the healer. “I suppose he has to do a lot of caring for you.”

“Yes, he does.”

“And how is he about that?”

“He’s great. I think he’s amazing.”

“I’m wondering whether, perhaps, somewhere in your mind, you’ve got the idea that ‘this relationship only works if I’m ill’?”

“I don’t think so,” I reply wearily. “We generally had a much nicer time when I wasn’t.”

The healing session continues, and I relax once more.

“Well, there’s always a benefit, isn’t there,” says the healer, “even when it’s really hard to see it.”

“A benefit?”

“A benefit to having an illness. The deep reason why we keep having it.”

I want to leap from the bed, put my SAS training into practice, and smash the woman in the face.

In such persons I diagnose a pathology of hypersignificance, an obsessive need to find meaning and pattern in human lives. Those afflicted with this disorder are psychologically unable to accept the extent to which we are embodied in physical reality, liable to be knocked about by the inheritance of some genetic susceptibility, by unwitting exposure to environmental risk factors, by the bizarre concatenations of chance. The novels of our lives are written only partly by ourselves; other forces regularly grab the pen, interpolating strange deviations and digressions, enforced changes of pace, character or plot.

But even while they are doing this, we retain some control over the quality of the prose. In the end we have one choice: to suffer well or suffer badly, to reach for or to reject that quality which is termed, equally, by both religious and secular, grace.

I would like to hear about other lives like mine. But I can find almost nothing written; even when people undertake Internet searches on my behalf they turn up only traces: an article in a nutritional journal; a chapter in a Swedish book; a brief mention of a woman with porphyria who listened all day to talking books—always descriptions from the outside, and never from within.

So I have assembled a collection of parallels distilled from my hours of incessant, incontinent listening, from that random parade of whodunnits and thrillers, histories, romances and memoirs that have spooled through the darkness beside me, and have become my window (however weirdly coloured, dirty or distorting) on the world.

I covet tales of human beings in extremis; want to know how they felt, what they did, how they bore it. I collect confinements, deprivations, degradations
that last;
I thirst for descriptions of the bearing of the unbearable, day after day, the flickering on of life in situations which, looked at from outside, invite merely horror, and the expectation of abandonment through suicide or despair.

My collection fascinates me. It is a set of polished pebbles, stored in a snug velvet pouch in my mind. From time to time I tip them out to examine them, turn them over and over, feel their relative weights and textures, experiment with order and with pattern. I am using them to think with, to map out the contours of my own predicament, to develop standards of comparison. Each has elements in common with my own situation, although it is not the same.

There are four parallels in all: