Girl in the Dark (2 page)

The books I listen to are random; they depend entirely on what is in the library when my book collector is there. I note down the titles on a list, divided alphabetically, so that my book collector does not bring
me books I have had before. That apart, my rate of consumption is so rapid and my need so intense that I cannot afford to be fussy. There are only two curiously contrasting prohibitions on the list: “Nothing by James Patterson or Miss Read.” I can live without the former’s detailed descriptions of the minutiae of serial killing; the latter’s accounts of the life of a village schoolmistress achieve a mixture of cattiness and smugness that render me simultaneously irritated and comatose.

For the rest, I let my authors take me where they will.

In my life before, I read at speed, skimming over the page, extracting a broad impression, seeking out salient points with a sceptical, summarising eye. Sometimes I (whisper it)
skipped descriptive passages altogether.
Now I am a captive audience and must ingest every single word. I lie back and let the plot build round me slowly, brick by brick. I collaborate willingly in my own slow seduction, for what do I want from my authors but long, long-lasting release? I come to hate interruptions in the narrative, to dread the voice which says, “That is the end of this side. The story continues on the next cassette.” I grab for the next tape, scrabble it out of the tight-fitting plastic surround with my fingernails, slam it into the machine and push the button down. I am a patient on morphine whose fix has been interrupted, desperate to restart the pain-dulling feed. Close up the gaps, hurry through the changes: in those small silences despair, I know, can easily come crashing back.

By way of this unprecedented, unbridled literary promiscuity, I have made some pleasant discoveries.
Having zero interest in racing, I would never, in the life before, have picked up one of Dick Francis’s horsey thrillers. But as companions in the dark, I find them amiably gripping. In one of them, the hero, a jockey-turned-accountant, is kidnapped and held in the dark in the back of a van for days, with only some bottled water and a bag of processed cheese for company; as my situation is somewhat better than his, I find this vaguely encouraging. The books celebrate the bloody-mindedness of the ordinary man: the hero will keep worrying away at a problem, and although he will certainly be knocked on the head, get tied up and suffer unpleasant consequences, he is never actually killed.

In the dark, although I listen to both, I prefer tapes to CDs. I am less likely to press the wrong button and become lost among the tracks, accidentally skipping forwards or entering a different mode, so that the sections unfurl in random order, or one repeats itself on an endless loop. In order to reverse what I have done, I have to carry my boombox downstairs, and peer at the tiny display as I poke away in the gloom.

I get to know the voices that speak to me from the corner of my dark room. There is the tough, macho chap with slightly Estuary vowels, who reads a lot of action thrillers. There is the deep-toned, chocolate-smooth voice, whose male characters are dashing and manly, but whose females, rendered in falsetto, all sound faintly imbecilic. There is the elegiac, lugubrious Michael Jayston, who specialises in the world-weary melancholy of P. D. James and John le Carré, and Miriam Margolyes, who creates so many characters with
such distinctive voices that it is difficult to believe that there is only one woman in there, and not a troupe.

When I finish a book, I find I cannot start another one immediately. Each book needs time to settle in my mind, to be digested like a meal of many courses. It seems disrespectful to the characters to move on too quickly—after all, I have spent hours in their company, learnt their histories, looked on at significant moments of their lives. I still have nagging questions echoing in my mind: surely someone would have noticed the substitution of the bodies? Why in American crime fiction do people eat so much pizza?

During these intermissions, I put on Radio 4. It can be counted on to provide an unceasing stream of trivial earnestness, a gentle showerbath for the soul.

When I am first in the dark, I frequently get lost. Even though the room is only a small space filled with simple objects—a bed, a bookshelf, a wardrobe, a bureau—the darkness can cause disorientation that is total, and terrifying. In my early days I find myself patting my hands across surfaces I cannot identify, feeling frantically for some sort of clue. Often my mind is absolutely convinced I am sitting on the floor facing in one direction, and then my hands start telling me something else. I cry out. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming, like a physical rending of my brain.

But this rarely happens now. I am in my element.
I move confidently about my box of darkness, lay my hand easily on the cotton-covered firmness of the bed, grasp the chair in the corner by the smooth curved poles that form its back, reach for the cool metal handle of the door and hear its catlike creak.

Sometimes I lose a sock, or my hairbrush, but there is no panic now, I feel calmly in each likely place, slowly passing from one to the other, and usually the object is found.

Gradually I do what is not in my nature; I develop routines: socks always go
there,
spectacles
there.
One day I reorganise my underwear drawer so that knickers are on the left and bras on the right. This puts an end to wild morning burrowing and flailing—I wonder why I have not done it before. But I know the answer to that. Simply—hope. Hope held me back. Each small accommodation of my physical environment is an admission that things are not improving, that this is not some fleeting horror, that perhaps …

But that is the unthinkable thought.

There is only one circumstance, now, where I can lose my orientation. Sometimes, in one of my small attempts to keep moving, to keep the blood flowing, I march on the spot. Often, I find, after a few minutes, that I have turned through 90 degrees, that the bed, rather than being beside me, is in front.

An anecdote told by a character in a thriller brings me the explanation. A man, lost in the Sahara, decides the best way out is to walk forward in a straight line. After several miles, he finds himself in the place where he started. Human legs are never of exactly equal length;
you may believe you walk straight ahead, but slowly, imperceptibly, your course will curve, you will tread a circle, and your beginning will be your end.

In the house with the drawn curtains and the sealed-up room, there is a second person living.

He is Pete, the person that I love. It is his house I wear, his rooms I have dimmed to quarter-light, his spare bedroom I have commandeered to make my lair.

My love has saved me. It wraps strong arms around me when I cry with despair; it gives me the routine of a working week to lend vicarious structure to my shapeless days. It brings me daily laughter, a reason to keep washing …

… and it slices me open with guilt. For I am creating two shadow lives, where there need only be one. I am sucking the light from Pete’s life, leaving him a twilit, liminal creature, single yet not single, who at social events sits alone among the couples, with a strange absent presence always by his side.

I argue with myself during my long periods alone. I undertake lengthy ethical investigations and conduct detailed philosophical analyses. I am trying to discern the behaviour that would, in my circumstances, be morally right. Should I leave him?

This would be difficult, practically; it would require time, research and careful organisation—but it could just about be done. I would need to find another place
to live, with another blacked-out room; either a place on my own, with people nearby who could be paid to do my shopping, or a place with someone who was prepared to look after me, prepared to close doors before they switch on lights, pull curtains before I come into a room; someone I could trust, because I would be at their mercy.

I pummel my conscience for an answer. By staying, by shirking the responsibility and effort of leaving, by continuing to occupy this lovely man while giving him neither children nor a public companion nor a welcoming home—do I do wrong?

This is how I reason, hour after hour. Then I hear his key in the door, and his tread on the stairs. I hear him call out “Wotcher, chuck!” and stomp about in the bedroom next door as he takes off his shoes and tie and puts on his slippers. Then he knocks at my door, and I say “Come in,” and scramble up to hug him.

And all my ethical reasoning crumbles to ash in the sheer fact of his presence. Because together, even in darkness, we light up a room; because the clotted guilt inside me breaks up and disperses before a surge of stupid happiness; because I love him, and I know I cannot leave him, am incapable of leaving him, unless he asks me to go.

And he has not asked me.

And that is the miracle which I live with, every day.

“What’s for dinner?” Pete asks, coming in to see me one Friday evening after he arrives home from work. I haven’t made any dinner, but I have conceptualised it, and done something about certain of its component parts. “There’s some left-over salad in a bowl in the fridge,” I say, “and I defrosted some smoked salmon. So, if you could boil some potatoes?”

“Sounds manageable,” says Pete, and goes off downstairs. He is not good at cooking. I try to keep his instructions simple, whilst still obtaining for us both a diet that is reasonably varied and healthy.

“OKAY!” Pete roars from below when the meal is ready. He’s turned off the main lights in the living room, and switched on a little lamp with a 25-watt bulb, which sits behind the TV cabinet. It is at one end of the room, and the dining table is at the other, so we can just about see each other, and what we are eating.

“So how have things been today?” he asks. (Sometimes even my brief forays out of the darkness reignite me, and the burning can take days to subside. Very occasionally, I have had to be fed in my room, on a tray.)

“Oh, much as usual,” I reply. “I’m listening to this bonkers talking book at the moment, about this group of friends training to be international bankers, and one of them is a psychopath. It’s kind of obvious who the psychopath is, but the characters take for ever to figure it out. Anyway, I got fed up and stopped listening for a bit and I heard this great programme on the radio. A bloke
was in India trying to record the roar of the Bengal tiger, and when he got one it sounded incredible, really deep and resonant, sort of like …”

I attempt to roar like a Bengal tiger.

“Yes, thank you, darling, it’s just like being there.”

“Well, you know, in broad terms … I haven’t really got the chest expansion. He also said that tigers are very territorial and like to patrol, so they can often be seen walking along roads in the national park.”

“Actually, I’ve seen a few pictures at the camera club of tigers walking along roads. One guy is going to India next month to photograph them. He’ll be stuck in a hide for hours, five nights in a row, but he’s always sitting in bushes waiting for birds, so presumably he’s used to it.”

Pete is not into wildlife photography. He prefers taking pictures of landscapes, and, in particular, of trees.

I ask, “How was work?”

“I did some calculations this morning,” says Pete, “and then the mainframe went down, so that was the end of that. Then Morose Man came to see me. He was even less talkative than usual. And I had a meeting with Bulgy-eyed Boss.”

“Oh goodness. Did he bulge at you?”

“Not at me, this time. But he did a classic on Corporate Man. He said, ‘I’m looking to YOU,’ and bulged at him over the top of his spectacles.”

“Scary stuff.”

“It was. Do you want any afters?”

“I’d like some fruit, please. There should be grapes in the fridge.”

Once we’ve finished eating, I retreat to my lair, and he does the washing-up.

At eight o’clock I switch on
Any Questions
and Pete joins me in the dark. After a hard week at the office, he likes to relax by listening to political types lay into each other on Radio 4.
Any Questions
is not my favourite programme, but this is one thing we can do together. I lie beside him on the narrow bed, exclaiming at intervals:

“They’ve completely missed the point!”

“This is just a load of platitudes.”

“Is this idiot still talking? I’ll put my head under the pillow, and you can nudge me when he’s finished.”

“Try not to get so worked up, darling,” says Pete, holding me. “We’re only on question one.”

Thus passes our Friday night.

Oh, what can I not do, in my dreams.

In my dreams I travel on trains and climb mountains, I play concerts and swim rivers, I carry important documents on vital missions, I attend meetings which become song-and-dance routines. My body lies boxed in darkness, but beneath my closed eyelids there is colour, sound and movement, in glorious contrast to the day; mad movies projected nightly in the private theatre of my skull.

My dreams are crowded with people, as though to compensate for the solitariness of my waking hours. People I know, famous people, people from obscure
parts of my past whom I thought I had forgotten, people I don’t know at all, spontaneously generated in some crevice of my brain, people who are disturbing incarnations of my deepest hopes and fears. People come together in strange, mixed-up groups—my aunt and John Humphrys, a girl I was at school with, a former colleague; bizarre in retrospect, but at the time having the compelling logic of dreams.

To wake is always horrible, plunging suddenly down a long dark chute to thump gracelessly on to the mattress. “Stop, stop,” I cry to the escaping dream, “I want you still.” But the dream speeds away to the horizon, and I am left clutching only a few remembered fragments, strands plucked from the vanishing tail.

Animals in zoos and prisoners sleep many hours a day. Like them I have become a devotee, a voluptuary of sleep, a connoisseur of its intense, uncharted pleasures. Sleep slips the chains of this life, snaps the intimate fetters of my skin, sets me free to travel the wild landscapes of the ungoverned mind. Each night I enter by the same door, yet find behind it something new. I plunge my hands into the lucky dip of dreams; sometimes I find sweets, and sometimes scorpions, but always, for a few hours, deliverance.