Girl in the Dark (18 page)

Pete has to go away for work, for five days, unexpectedly, at the start of the following month.

“Oh Pete,” I wail, when he tells me, “that’s just a couple of weeks before you go on holiday to Skye.”

He is booked on a photographic trip to the Scottish island organised by a specialist company; the group will be taken by minibus to all the good locations, where they will leap out and set up their equipment. “Doesn’t that mean you all end up with the same picture?” I ask, puzzled, when he first describes this, but apparently it does not.

Having known about the trip for some time, I have painstakingly arranged for people to come and stay while he is not here. Now—now I face having to do it all over again, with shorter notice, and everyone’s plans already in place.

“Do you have to go?” I ask Pete.

“Well, yes I do. I’m sorry about the lack of notice, I can’t help it. This sometimes happens, with work.”

“But—does it always have to be you? Don’t they realise you have caring responsibilities? I don’t know—supposing you had a sick child or something …”

He looks away. He has not, of course, said anything at work, or only in the most general terms. “Well, I could say that, I suppose, but I would rather not. Anyway, you are not as bad as you have been.”

And this is true. Barring accidents, provided with food, and with a creative approach to when and how I do the washing up (the kitchen sink being by a window that faces south, and the blind only a partial barrier), I can function here, in the house, on my own. I do not need a carer. What I need is something more abstract
and intangible: a human presence about the place, occasional company when I have to go into the black; company that understands my situation and cares enough to observe the protocols, waiting till I’m out of the room and closing the door prior to turning on overhead lights.

The next afternoon, I pick up the phone to my mother with a heavy coldness in my stomach.

“Mum, you know you were going to come and stay when Pete goes on holiday—”

“Oh yes, don’t worry—it’s in my diary, I’ve moved my pupils—it’s all arranged. I’m coming for the first part of the week—I’m really looking forward to it—and then Sam’s going to do Thursday night and Friday, and I think you’ve got Celeste coming at the weekend?”

“Yes … that’ll be great … it’s just … unfortunately—well, Pete’s just told me he’s got a five-day trip for work, two weeks before.”

“What … you mean the sixth to the tenth?”

“Yes.”

“The sixth to the tenth next month?”

“Yes.”

“I wish you’d told me sooner. I’ve got pupils doing exams, and it’s my recital on the fourteenth. I suppose Sam
might
be able to come, depending on his schedule. Isn’t there anyone else?”

And there’s the rub.

I hate this situation, this having to ask and plead. Faster than anything else, it makes me feel a total failure. Somehow, in my life before, I should have been more charismatic and popular, so that people, now, would
cross counties to babysit me. I should have judged better, spread myself more thinly, not spent my time on intimate friendships that would not stand the test.

“How did you get on with your mum?” Pete asks, when he gets home from work.

I shrug hopelessly and my eyes fill with tears. “I think I’d prefer to cope on my own,” I say. “I’m sure I’ll manage. I just wish your holiday wasn’t so soon afterwards.”

“You know I have to have my holiday,” says Pete. “If I didn’t, I’d probably beat you up.”

He would not, of course, but I know what he is trying to say.

Pete does not emote much. He very rarely shows anger or frustration at me or our situation, being more likely to get cross if the table is sticky, or I have left a mess of paper, books and mail-order packaging all over the living room. But it has to come out somewhere; he needs to go off and do stuff, and I have to let him.

His trips are a mini-holiday for me as well—having different people to stay means I consult different tastes regarding meals; use garlic and spices, on which Pete is not keen; eat later in the evening; sometimes even
leave the washing up entirely,
which Pete is constitutionally unable to do; watch other people’s TV programmes; play piano duets and cards.

In the end, Sam comes for a couple of days, instead of coming when originally planned. I book an Alexander technique lesson for one morning, with my lovely teacher who comes to the house. Two telephone friends agree to phone. In case of emergencies, I have the number
of the neighbour who is good at DIY (once, one of my visitors, conscientiously drawing the curtain, ripped the entire curtain rail away from the wall).

Pete phones me every day, sometimes more than once. “Can you hear that?” he says one evening. “I’m just beside the sea.” From the handset comes a regular whoosh and rasp, like a giant’s heavy breathing.

I am transported.

The next step—the eighth—crosses a boundary: I venture out at twilight, and catch my first glimpse of a non-dark world, painted in subtle shades of grey.

Equipment is required in order to progress to the ninth thing. The human eye, because it is so instantly responsive to conditions, is very bad at judging absolute levels of light. I would like to venture forth a little earlier, to catch some colour in the world, before it drains away. But how to judge, in different seasons and under different skies, the amount of light to which I’ll be exposed?

Once more I have reason to be grateful for Pete’s photographic bent. “What you need is a light meter,” he says, and procures me one from a technical website. It is a rectangular black palm-sized gadget, with a white half-sphere at one end to measure ambient light and a digital display on which the reading appears.

Pete sets it up in idiot mode, so that, unless I really put my mind to it, I cannot mess things up—and a
whole new world of objective measurement opens its doors. “This evening I did f2.8 at one second,” I say happily, having been in the garden a little after sunset, but before the world is monochrome. It is early June—I have looked at orange poppies and pink roses, and watered tomato plants like green and writhing snakes. The colours slam into my retinas like crossbow bolts—but it is sweet pain.

I learn the peculiar scale that light meters employ: f1 (almost dark) is followed by f1.4, f2, f2.8 then f4 (about when street lights come on), f5.6, f8 (the sun just above the horizon, if the sky is clear). Pete explains that each step up represents a doubling of the amount of light, so I should be prudent when attempting to move from one level to the next. He also, lest I get too excited, points out that light levels at noon are f200 plus; I am taking baby steps, nibbling at the edges of the day.

Nevertheless, I am thrilled to have a way to track my progress. I note down in my diary each evening the f-number at which I went out. When people ask me how I am, I reply at first with incomprehensible technical blather, describing how I “managed f8 yesterday and hope to try f16 at the weekend.” Only photographers understand.

My diary has a useful page showing sunrise and sunset times for each week of the year. This is very helpful for me, as I can work out at around what time I should start preparing for my walk. I have become a dusk-tracker, an adherent of planetary rather than human time, following the swing of the earth as it loops around its star. My slice of dusk moves through the day, its contents
changing with the seasons as the days contract and dilate like the slow pupil of an eye. In winter I coincide with children in scarves and hats walking home from school; at equinoxes, with the return of car-borne commuters to suburban driveways; in April and August, with the hour of soap, when there are few people abroad and giant TV screens effloresce from the walls or corners of front rooms. Around midsummer I must wait and wait for hours, far into the evening, as a fiery teardrop slides down the blue cheek of the sky.

One day I go out for my evening walk at f8, according to my light meter. I wander for a while among the houses, then cut down a path which leads to open ground. A stream in a concrete culvert runs through the estate, and the developers have left a broad area of grass along either side, with occasional trees and hawthorn bushes, so that the whole forms a sort of miniature valley where people stroll or walk their dogs, and children ride their bikes.

I turn on to the path beside the stream—and stop in my tracks.

There, just above the horizon, oozing dark crimson into flesh-coloured cloud—a giant inflamed eye.

For the first time since the darkness, I have come face to face with the sun.

I look at the sun. The sun looks at me. Something indescribable passes between us.

It is a first parley between old, old enemies. It is coming across a former lover suddenly, in the street, years after they broke your heart. It is sitting down to negotiate with terrorists, looking across the table into the eyes of a killer, knowing that the two of you are locked in this thing together, and some modus vivendi must be found.

I stand on the path by the stream. I extend my hand to the horizon.

“Hello, sun,” I say.

What I would like to do is find a way to travel for a while
before
dusk to a scenic spot so that when my time comes I can burst forth and enjoy my walk somewhere new.

But how is this to be done? Dracula travelled from Transylvania to Whitby in one of a consignment of coffins; he came out each night to prowl about the ship and feast upon the crew.

A coffin, however, is not practicable. There could be difficulties breathing, and it would not fit in the car. Instead, Pete and I devise a contraption that can be installed and uninstalled in the back seat. It consists of a large piece of industrial felt, black, half a centimetre thick, and two long wires. According to the photobiology department at the hospital I once attended, high-quality black felt is the most light-protective material. The wires are strung between the grab handles which
sit above each of the back doors. They pass in and out of holes in the felt, so that they hold it up. The forward part of the felt hangs over the back of the front passenger seat.

The result is a sort of small tent in which I can sit while being driven about the countryside. My friend Pam christens it the Puppy Cage.

Now my horizons expand. I consult my table of dusks and dawns, subtract the amount of time before sunset that I can currently manage, and estimate the length of the journey to the common or woods I have in mind. This tells me when we’ll need to leave the house. Then I subtract a further ten minutes to allow for wrestling with the puppy cage. Unfortunately this is something Pete has to do on his own. The felt is heavy and unwieldy, and the green wires stick out of it like tentacles. A person watching him manoeuvre it towards and then into the car would conclude he was fighting to the death with a slightly home-made-looking monster, perhaps from an early series of
Doctor Who.

Once the damn thing is in place, Pete gives a signal to me. In my hat, coat and boots I charge out of the house and nosedive into the open back door of the car, burrowing under the folds of the felt. I flail about for a while finding my seatbelt and disentangling my handbag straps, then, finally, we’re off. I am sitting diagonally behind Pete, and encased in heavy material, so conversation is muffled. It is difficult to pass casual remarks without having to roar them at a volume out of proportion to their significance:

“Highland cows coming up on the right.”

“What sort of nice house?”

“What?”

“What sort of house?”

“Not house, COWS.”

“What?”

“Oh, never mind, we’ve gone past them.”

“Gone past what?”

“HIGHLAND COWS.”

“Oh, right.”

Pause.

“I wonder what Highland cows are doing in Hampshire, anyway.”

“Being hairy, I suppose.”

“What?”

“BEING HAIRY.”

And so on.

But it’s all worth it when we get to the woods. I leap from my puppy cage, my nose glorying in a thousand different outdoor smells, and bound towards the freedom of the trees.

I discover that I have become crepuscular, and that I share this characteristic with various creatures, including deer, rabbits and short-eared owls.

Also wombats, apparently.

Growing up in London, I never went to the New Forest. It isn’t very hilly, and my upbringing taught me to associate holidays and days out with strenuous ascents followed by contemplation of the world from a high vantage point, rather than the more tenebrous pleasures of trees.

Emerging from my darkness in Hampshire, however, I find the New Forest is a good place for expeditions. It is easy to get to, and the shade of the trees stretches the time I can be outside. I can start my dusk walk earlier than I could in open country, and stay out later after dawn.

I am impressed by the rugged girth of the ancient trees, their intense individuality, their fabulous lived-in look. Lattices of ivy stems cross-garter their lower trunks, mistletoe springs from out-flung limbs, holly bushes sprout between long gnarled toes. Lichens in understated greys and beige, and designer mosses, smooth as moleskin, or hairy like fake fur, patch their corrugated skins. Supersized fungi stud them, like jewels.

They stand at intervals, these huge bedecked trees. Smaller, younger trees grow between them, but it is clear that these are mere underlings assisting at the council of their elders, and do not really count. Pete and I wander past the ankles of the great, of no more moment than a cat that, during a conclave of cardinals, pads across the room.

Trees may well have matters to discuss. I have heard
of a mysterious occurrence that suggests co-operation between oak trees. Mice eat the acorns of oaks; a few fruitful years cause the mouse population to explode, and the chances of acorns eluding their attentions become small. But then there comes a year in which the oaks produce no acorns at all. Many mice die because they can find no food. In the years after the cull, acorns reappear. It works, of course, only if all oaks act together.