Girl in the Dark Read online

  “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:

  My darling and Lord of my heart

  I accept that you know about Art

  Or at least that you know

  What a Judge in a Show

  Might consider as looking the part.

  My darling I’m down on the ground

  Confessing your judgement is sound

  And your eye for a pic

  Is both subtle and quick

  And your nose as acute as a hound.

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

  Metaphor

  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.

  Parallels

  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:

  1. Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, a book rich in strange and terrible confinements. The King, Louis XI, keeps a man in a cage; he was once the Bishop of Verdun. He has been in the cage for years, in a room in the Bastille. He pleads with whoever passes to intercede for him. The king will never let him out.

  On the Grève, in a stone tower of the Tour Rolande, a penitent, years ago, walled herself in. A single small barred window opens on to the street outside through which people occasionally pass water and food. Mostly she sits on the straw of her cell and weeps for the loss of her child. She has been there sixteen years.

  Under the fortress of the Tournelle lie the dungeons; under the dungeons lies the deepest, darkest pit of all. The only entrance is through a trap door. There is no light or warmth; the walls and floor exude a cold and liquid discharge; once a prisoner is confined there, that is the end. For this is the oubliette, where people are placed to be oublié—that is, to be forgotten.

  2. The Innocent Man by John Grisham describes a miscarriage of justice in small-town America. It is a true story. The book includes an account of the facility for Death Row prisoners at the Oklahoma state prison in McAlester. When it was opened in 1993, it was held to be the most modern, hi-tech and secure of its kind.

  The building was entirely underground; the prisoners never saw natural light. The cells, and the furniture in them, were made of concrete. The concrete was never plastered over or painted, so the prisoners permanently breathed concrete dust. The “closed” ventilation system, which allowed no air in from the outside, frequently broke down. No one cared about the prisoners’ health—hey, they were going to die anyway, right? But many lived on the Row ye
ar after year, as appeals ground their way through the system.

  3. The Secret Hunters by Ranulph Fiennes, a novelisation of documents apparently found in a hut in Antarctica, telling how ex-Nazis try to found a new Reich funded by a secret Antarctic gold seam, but are pursued by a man who had escaped the Holocaust when he was a boy.

  The book contains a description of Auschwitz.

  None of the facts are new to me. I have been told them, taught them from early in my life. I have read books, watched documentaries, seen Schindler’s List.

  Somehow, nothing prepared me for this. Maybe it is the dark, or the first-person narrative, or my own mental state; but I am completely overwhelmed. It is the systematic humiliation before killing, the deliberate, conscious dehumanisation that grips me. My heart races and my breath comes in flickering waves, filling and emptying only the top tenth of my lungs. My torso is wrapped in iron; and the plates squeeze ever tighter together as if someone is tightening a screw. I know I should stop the machine, detach myself, relax, but it is as if the tape is passing physically through me, entering my skull through my left ear, slicing across through my brain. I cannot escape. I listen without a break, for hours.

  4. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby. In his early forties, a journalist, the editor of Elle in Paris, has a massive stroke. When he regains consciousness he finds he is completely paralysed. He has what is known as “locked-in syndrome.” He cannot move any part of his body—everything must be done for him. But his mind is alert and clear.

  He finds that he can move one of his eyelids slightly. By blinking at the appropriate letter as another person reads off the alphabet, he finds he can, with the help of an amanuensis, compose requests, remarks and finally the text of this book.

  I am impressed by Jean-Dominique Bauby. I think about him a lot. I wonder whether, to enjoy as he does the pleasure of sunsets, the trips out of the hospital to the beach, the drawings and cards from his friends and his children that decorate his room, the companionship of the TV; whether, to gain, as it were, the benefits of light, I would trade the movement of my body.

  The pleasures of a body without light are not glamorous but, nonetheless, not negligible. I can go to the lavatory when I please. I can eat when I choose and, within the limits of what has been procured for me, the food of my choice. I can savour my food. I can flex my limbs, within the confines of my dark box. I can talk freely to visitors, missing only the nuances of gesture and expression.

  In common, Bauby and I share the hunger for visits, the long hours to be got through alone.

  Would Bauby choose to swap fates with me, or I with Bauby? Perhaps it is as well that life does not give us such choices. We would spend hopeless hours with our pens poised above the questionnaire, unable to decide in which box to make our mark.

  The worst part of the book, for me, is the afterword, because that is when I find out that Jean-Dominique Bauby is dead; that he died, in fact, in 1997, two years and a few months after his stroke.

  I am immeasurably distressed. I feel his death strongly, on behalf of all who lead impossible lives. It is too neat an ending, too easy a let-out for those who read his story, providing convenient closure, when, actually, for many there is none—just year after year of continuance, with the years blurring into each other, looping back on themselves, becoming hopelessly entangled in the mind, because the memorable events are so few and widely spaced upon the grey ropes of time.

  Dream 4

  I am in the bedroom of the flat in London where I used to live. It is a lovely room, facing south, with two large windows through which I can look down into the quiet street or up into suburban sky. In my dream, as in my memories, it is snug and warm, with sunbeams patterning the bristly brown carpet and dust particles dancing in iridescent swarms.

  I sit on my bed with its crisp white sheets, and suddenly it is evening, the curtains are closed, and the room has become cold. Pete is there, with his head turned away so that I see only his profile. Someone else is also in the room, a woman in a short skirt and knee-high boots, with long straight brown hair cut across in a fringe. (I think the boots are unwise, because the woman has incredibly thin legs.) She is wandering about looking at my things, opening drawers, making comments on pictures, taking books off the shelves.

  Pete, still not looking at me, is telling me that he is leaving me, that he regrets having to do it, but he knows I will understand.

  I feel as though my heart, my lungs, my liver and my bowels have been gouged from the front of my body. Agony and emptiness invade me. I say nothing, cannot, in fact, say anything, just gaze at Pete’s craggy profile and at his beautiful mouth as he speaks sensible, reasonable words, with which I can find no fault and make no argument. I am in shock, but I am not surprised. “So it’s happened,” I think to myself. “What shall I do now?”

  And I wake in the darkness, believing the dream, and lie in bed rigid and panting, but with my mind already beginning to work, to chew over the remnants of my world.

  I do not know how long I lie there, mourning and making plans. At last, tiny things start to burrow into my consciousness, carrying the pricklings of doubt. I hear the central heating come on with its characteristic hammer and grunt. I hear the bathroom door open and close, and the click of a light switch.

  “Was I really in London?” I wonder, still half inside my dream. “In the light, in my flat? Surely that’s impossible—that flat was sold a long time ago. And if I wasn’t there, did any of it happen at all?”

  And I remember how, years ago, a couple of months before I sat my A levels, I had a similar practice dream. In total, compelling detail, I dreamt that I received my results, and got three Ds, which made my planned course and university place impossible. I awoke, desperately disappointed and ashamed, and lay in bed for at least an hour, trying to work out what to do. I weighed up the pros and cons of resits, and wondered if I should stop trying to be an academic, and go to music college instead. I pushed my mind back to the exams themselves, hoping for a clue as to what had gone wrong—and found I had absolutely no memory of taking them.

  Then I looked out of my window at soft spring drizzle falling on small-leaved trees, and my heart leapt as I realised that the future was still a clean page, its words yet to be written. But I was always grateful for the dream. It had given me a chance to practise my emotions, to experience in advance what, if the worst happened, they would be.

  Strange Thoughts

  In the pool of my mind, I find strange thoughts swimming. They flick across the corners of my inner eye, half-seen, yet distinct enough to allow identification.

  Three separate species tenant these murky depths. There is the soft grey fish with scales of shadows, whose name, I find, is envying the dead. Each time I hear about a death, no matter whose—a relative, acquaintance, politician or some long-forgotten star—I feel within that sudden flash, that twist and plunge of jealousy. For the dead have already found their end, have found their turning from that long straight road; their story is complete, the last words written—the future can no longer terrify. They are enclosed both ends by time, wrapped in its gentle wadding, stored away as precious things. I still hurtle forwards on the cutting edge of chaos, into who knows what desolate and unexplored frontiers.

  The second species is pale in colour; it drifts through the water like a reflection of the moon. Its name is believing that you are a ghost; it feeds on lengthy periods alone.

  For hours, I cannot see the hand in front of my face; I cannot see my arms, my knees, my feet. In my box, I have no impact on the world, which travels on its course quite as if I were not in it. People pass the silent, shuttered house and, if they think at all, they probably conclude that it is empty. And what does dwell within? A thing that lurks, that creeps, that mopes, that wanders now and then from room to room, that flees in terror from the wide-flung welcoming front door, the joyful flicking-on of lights.

  It is not surprising that I have delusions of non-existence
.

  And, lastly, there’s the thought that lurks at the bottom of the pool, where debris and slime have settled in layers, and the water is viscous and dim. It is an enormous pike, black and massive and strong, with spines along its back and rows of razor teeth. It can stay hidden for days, motionless in some mud hole, and I will catch no glimpses of its mottled, warty skin. But it will always re-emerge to float about the lower reaches of my soul. Its name, of course, is suicide.

  The Means to an End

  Most of the time, I do not want to die. But I would like to have the means of death within my grasp. I want to feel the luxury of choice, to know the answer to “How do I bear this?” need not always be “Endure.”

  I fret about the ways and means. I shrink from pain and violence, from mess, from the possibility of a botched job. I worry for the person who will find me, believe a still form on a bed would be less horrible than a bathtub full of blood. I am nervous of that period after the irrevocable act has been committed but before unconsciousness supervenes; in that intervening time, it is surely not impossible that your mind could change. How many suicides die in mental anguish, having clarified their true desires only by taking a drastic and irreversible step? There are no feedback forms beyond the grave.

  I would like to have a stock of pills. I would keep them in the corner of a cupboard; they would be my insurance policy, their very presence easing my mind. But how do I obtain them? To phone my doctor and claim trouble sleeping is possible, but it is doubtful that the subterfuge could be sustained; my doctor knows my situation, and would swiftly smell a rat.

  Then there is the wild world of the Internet, where, according to concerned voices on Radio 4, a multiplicity of sites offer detailed how-to guidance, chat rooms facilitate bonding with others also contemplating the exit, and online pharmacies supply the necessary dope.