Somebody Somewhere (31 page)

M
y public relations person had silky blond hair and a soft but sure voice. She was lovely but she shook. Eventually we got used to each other. She became my “the world” eyes and ears. I could only take everything said as statements, but she was able to see subtle and double meanings and judge the relative significance of journalists' questions and “where they were going.”

I was asked what happened to Willie and Carol. I was asked about sex, sexuality, and men. I was asked about my family. I was asked about childhood abuse. “But surely you must think that abuse affected you?” I was asked again and again and again. In my mind I saw my mother. I saw fifteen years of me unable to relate to her directly and, at times when I was capable, I saw me ignoring her as irrelevant to “my world.” But surely you must think that abuse affected
her
? I thought. Sometimes abuse is neither visual nor intentional.

Finally I spelled it out for them. I had feared closeness, so I didn't suffer so much for rejection. I had been fiercely controlling and independent, so I didn't suffer so much for neglect. I had been a world unto myself and I was my own family, so I didn't suffer so much from the lack of belonging. My persecutor didn't have my advantages.

I took the journalists out for walks. They could know my thinking and words through writing, they could know me by spending time in my company outdoors simply being.

I
t was Christmas Day and Santa Claus was on vacation from the literary agency. My publisher, foreign publishing agent, and public relations person all disappeared to live their own lives. I came to understand the division between business and friendship. When it comes down to it, friendship doesn't take a vacation at Christmas but business does.

I sat alone on the floor of my cozy shoebox room in the hotel. My stomach ached with a sense of homesickness for a home I did not have. I painted a picture entitled “Home.” I imagined I was in this elusive place. It was a picture of a place I had never been to except in my mind. There were wildflowers and distant hills, tall grass to dance in, and wild birds flying across a pink sunrise sky.

I went walking around the streets among the street people of inner London's Christmas atmosphere. I had arrived in London to see beggars in droves, and after giving away around three pounds every day, I finally was enlightened by my publisher and agent.

It wasn't that I was charitable. It was just that by the time I struggled to make sense of what beggars said to me, they were well into the details of their well-rehearsed spiels, saying precisely what they wanted money for. I found myself again and again actually telling them to wait, and I would buy them something to eat after having been told they needed money because they were hungry and wanted to buy food.

The sudden fall into a total lack of structure after days and days of appointments and involvement with people left me swimming in space so free it was overwhelming. In my pre-diabetic state I forgot something else. I totally forgot to eat. With severe hypoglycemia, I was supposed to eat every two to four hours.

I went to a Christmas movie. Alone in one of the back rows, I was lost and in a dream. As the pace of the movie climbed, my blood-sugar level plummeted.

I walked out of the cinema not sure where I was. I was drifting into a sleep state. My conscious thoughts were like wispy clouds drifting by and hard to grasp. This place looks awfully strange for Australia,
came one of my own drifting, wispy cloud-thoughts. It's London. It's London, I reminded myself trying to make sense of the word “London” as it drifted by. Jet lag couldn't take this long to catch up. Something is wrong, I thought suddenly. I felt slapped by the contrast of a thought that struck home with feeling and significance. Fear filled my stomach with rocks. Oh my God, I thought, I am asleep.

I was scared. I knew I was in trouble but my cloud-thoughts wouldn't let me stay on track enough to work out why. Where was I living? Which way was home? What did “home” mean? Oh no. Meaning-shutdown. Oh shit.

I wandered around the wintery streets crying, feeling homeless and helpless. The feeling triggered a memory: stray cats, cobblestone laneways, my duffle coat around me to keep out the cold.

Carol pulled the hood of her “mobile home” over her head and buried her hands in her pockets. She had had the coat since she was twelve but it still fit her now at the age of seventeen. She sang as she walked along, each street joining the next, on and on and on to nowhere in particular. She found herself in a schoolyard. A piece of an amber bottle sat at her feet. She picked it up and held it to her eye, looking through it up at the moon. Colored glass, she thought. She threw it to the ground, where it broke into pieces. She bent down and gathered up the pieces to take home and put in a shoe box. She would put all the pieces in a shoe box and make a cellophane lid for it and she would gather all sorts of pieces of colored glass and shake them about, listening to the tinkle they made and watching the colors rush like they do when you run your fingers through colored beads.

I had on a long, black coat My hand upon it, I was deeply shocked. How on earth did I get my duffle coat back? came a dense cloud-thought. No, it's my long, black coat, I answered myself, my waking mind wrestling with the one drifting off to Never-Land. Phew! “Long, black coat,” “London”—I tried to string the concepts together in a mind that had suddenly shut the doors, turned out the lights, and was in a vacuum. I continued to fall into a void, the end of which I knew was the Big Black Nothingness. To fall into a deep
sleep while sleep-walking and sleep-talking in a strange city is the stuff nightmares are made of.

I wandered past a hotel that looked familiar. That's your room, I told myself. My words were wispy clouds and made no connection to consequences as they fell upon deaf ears. I passed my own hotel and was headed nowhere. Just
don't
get on a train, I told myself, a dense cloud leaving some trace of impact.
Don't
go to the ocean. I knew that if I did either of those things, anything could happen in this floating sleep-walking state.

I wandered down another street. It was dark. I had been walking for ages. I hadn't eaten all day. With hypoglycemia, my blood-sugar level must have been dangerously low and my ability to focus mentally was hopeless. My brain was a sieve. If I had come up with the word “food,” I wouldn't have worked out what it meant, let alone what to do about it.

Some men were gathered in front of a house as I sauntered past on my way nowhere. I was captured by the pattern of black and white squares they were standing on. “Scatar,” sneered one of them. “Scatar,” I echoed back in his own accent, and spat suddenly and automatically upon the footpath, unaware of the significance of having called out “slut” in Macedonian. I continued to walk ahead in a daze. The men got into a car, their words and actions a thousand miles away.

“Malaka,” shouted one viciously out the window as they casually drove along beside me, calling me “shit” in his own language. “Malaka,” I echoed in the man's own accent.

A sense of danger struck a chord sharply. I could make no sense of it. Walk, I heard myself silently say, thinking in a version of my mother's voice, the thunderclap of a storm cloud-thought. If anything was going to motivate me to move and move quickly, that was. Willie was back and probably just in time. Get to the hotel, he said silently to himself in a sharp and cutting order that broke through my cloudy consciousness like cold water over someone sleeping. It was like being back in my family. Understanding and fear were irrelevant. My feet followed automatically.

Like a robot, I walked at a fast and mechanical pace. My feet kept time with my own heartbeat, which had now changed from a dead pace to the speed of a metronome on allegro. This was probably the first adrenaline rush, a reaction by the brain to the liver to break down food stores and maintain consciousness. It couldn't have come at a better time. The men had passed me and hopefully given up.

At each corner, Willie, the eyes in the darkness, shouted mentally to turn. I was half asleep in the shadows. My feet turned. Out in front of the hotel, Willie said mentally to himself, This is it. I stood there fighting, a soldier rebelling against unintelligible commands of the commander. This is what? I thought in wispy cloud-thoughts, not working out the significance. Get inside, Willie said to himself, doing a mental imitation of my mother. Again I felt struck by a thunderclap.

I knew this was a familiar hotel. I knew I was staying here. But the “I” and the “hotel” and the “staying” were all floating concepts, purely theoretical, totally without personal significance and thoroughly unconnected.

Key in hand, I opened the door to the room I knew in theory belonged to the person with my name. I knew nothing more than that the things in this room also belonged to this person and that this was the safest place to be right now.

I realized my blood-sugar level was probably dangerously low but couldn't translate that beyond the word “danger.” I couldn't work out the consequences it ought to have had for cooking and eating, let alone manage the order and mechanics of the acts in this state.

I knew that after the adrenaline rush, my blood-sugar level would go almost up to that of people with hyperglycemia and diabetes but then it would again drop to a dangerous level of hypoglycemia. I had been told that if this happened I could go to sleep and not wake up. But my mind was far from able to recall such a complete picture or act upon it. I did probably the most dangerous thing I could have done. I went to sleep.

I woke up in a sweat, with my heart racing again. This time, without the distractions of creeps following me swearing through a car window, I focused on what to do. I got up and ate a pile of dried biscuits and bread, drank orange juice, took vitamins, and then
crashed out again to sleep. The next day I made a rule never again to leave my hotel room without eating something.