Girl in the Dark Page 15

  Luckily, being a small dog, its powers of propulsion only take it to three or four times its actual height. I stand frozen with my back to a coppice of hazel as, barking fiercely, it bounces up and down to the level of my chest.

  “Come here, Hugo,” the owner, a scruffy, oddly dressed type, says lackadaisically. Then, when the dog takes no notice, he says accusingly, “It’s your hat. He doesn’t like your hat.”

  I smile weakly, expecting the man to call his dog off, but although he says, “Come here, Hugo,” a couple more times, and opens the boot of his car, the dog continues to bounce, like a rubber ball with curving, miniature claws.

  “He doesn’t like hats,” the man says again.

  “Look,” I say breathlessly, “I have to wear a hat for medical reasons. I would like to take it off, but I can’t.”

  My heart is pounding and my legs are starting to shake; the dog seems to be gaining momentum, its snapping jaws getting closer to my face. Pete tries to distract it, and the man thumps the boot with his hand, calling it to get on board, but it is obsessed.

  There is no one else in the tiny forest car park, a small tongue of mud and gravel off the side of a country road. Long yellow rays of low sun weave through the leafless trees; I feel them warm the back of my coat. I consider running, but I am standing on snow that has been compacted to lethal smoothness by many wheels and feet; the last thing I want to risk is a fall that would bring me within range of those teeth.

  Despairingly I lift up my hand. I grasp the brim of my hat, and pull it down to my side, scrunching it in my fingers to try to conceal it from view. The sun encircles my head.

  The dog subsides, barks cursorily a couple more times, jumps into the waiting boot. The man laughs, slams his door, and drives on his way. I replace the hat and we have our walk, but I do not escape the consequences: the next day, and several days afterwards, in the dark.

  I ask everyone I know about dogs and hats. What is it that the dog thought it saw on top of my head? Or was it what it could not see—my eyes, perhaps, shadowed beneath the brim? The whole thing remains mysterious, serving only to increase my circumspection when I am out and about, and some low leaping form appears in my field of view.

  Garden

  I did not have much interest in growing things, in the life before. Emerging from the darkness into a light-limited, largely housebound life, I look about for occupation, and discover the garden. Plants do not mind being attended to at dusk; in fact, where watering is concerned, they actively like it. So long as I can go outside at f4 or above, it’s safe to hack back branches and prune roses without risk to limbs. (I did try twilit weeding at f2, but, failing to distinguish leaf-shapes in the gloom, I unexpectedly grasped a nettle.)

  The garden, when I first give it my attention, has been Pete’s for several years. It is full of low-maintenance trees and shrubs, chosen because they have good colour in autumn, abundant blossom in spring, interesting seed heads, or some other feature of photographic interest. I can appreciate a good seed head as much as the next person, but I instinctively feel that something is missing. Apart from a lovely apple tree of the variety “Reverend W. Wilkes,” which showers us most Augusts with huge, blushing cooking apples, there is nothing in the garden that we can EAT.

  I start with herbs in pots. Then I move on to tomato plants in containers, potatoes in the old compost heap and Giant Russian sunflowers against the fence. Then I order a small raised bed, and plant salad leaves, radishes, rocket and strawberries. My army of containers slowly marches across the patio, until it is occupied completely, and surrenders.

  I have more enthusiasm than expertise. One summer, I watch with interest as the fruit on one of my tomato plants ripens. Soon the plant is heavy with juicy yellow fruit. But I do not pick it, because I am expecting it to turn red, to match the picture on the plant label.

  Not a spot of red appears. Finally I twig. I have a yellow tomato plant. I make the tomatoes into a golden salad. They are as sweet as plums.

  I acquire a blueberry bush, but it does nothing at all. I am told by a friend that blueberries need to be grown in pairs, so that they can cross-pollinate. The next year, I acquire a second bush. In the spring, it starts to produce sprigs of white, globe-shaped flowers, with little frills round the bottom, like fancy lampshades. But the first blueberry is still refusing to play.

  I phone the garden centre. “Do you have a blueberry bush which has flowers on now?” I ask. They do. I despatch Pete. “Secure that blueberry!” I tell him. We place all three pots together in a triangle—and a miracle occurs. Suddenly all the blueberries are blooming madly and, after having some form of group sex, produce a profusion of fruit.

  I try to analyse why I have become so addicted to fruit and vegetable growing. It’s partly a frustrated urge to be economically and socially useful: unable to undertake paid work to contribute to society, I can at least contribute food. It also gives me objects to care for outside myself which require my regular attention, whose health can be fretted over, and achievements praised, like pets or low-maintenance children. Sometimes I become so absorbed in the healthy growth of one of my charges that I almost forget to harvest it, having temporarily lost sight of the fact that, unlike pets or children, my plants are not what philosophers call “ends in themselves,” but only means for the sustaining of other life.

  Most of all, I like to feel the force of nature under my hands, to sense in a seed or a stem that coiled, compressed energy, that massive latent power, that thrust upwards and outwards which cracks concrete and crumbles masonry to dust, that raw lust for the sun. It reminds me that I too am part of nature, that the same power pulses in my veins, and I hope that whatever the obstacles it will keep pushing to straighten out the deformations of my skin, and point me, finally and irrevocably, towards the light.

  Assistant

  I want an assistant to help me use the computer. I decorate a small card with felt-tip pens. “Are you computer-literate?” it says, in curly pink and purple letters. I add a few flowers for good measure, a job description and my contact details. Pete puts the card up in Tesco. I receive many replies. I recruit a nice lady who comes once a week for two hours.

  It is a varied job. Sometimes I need letters typing or emails sending. Sometimes I am interested in research papers on light sensitivity. Sometimes I have simply set my heart on a new hat.

  Having an assistant means I no longer have to bother Pete to do online things for me. He looks at computers for most of his working day, and a large part of photography, in a digital age, involves fiddling with Photoshop.

  I confine myself to limited communications and transactions. My emails are brisk and to the point. I can’t afford to pay my assistant to engage on my behalf in the more spontaneous, interactive, weird and time-wasting aspects of the Web. It could also be rather embarrassing; what one might be quite willing to share electronically with thousands of anonymous strangers, one may still not wish to disclose to a nice lady sitting in the next room. Thus I forswear chat rooms, gambling, social networking and Internet porn. It is frustrating, but no doubt good for the soul.

  My assistant, Claire, is quite posh. She has not worked since she got married in her mid-twenties and is now in her late forties, very attractive and well turned-out. Being short and petite, she always wears high heels—cowboy boots or tight leather boots in the winter and sandals when it’s warm. She has four children, with fabulously posh names, and a dog called Harvey, whom she loves, and takes on walks for at least two hours each day.

  She is always in the middle of some sort of interior design project in her home, worrying about builders, or the delivery of sofas, or the sourcing, for a fireplace, of marble of precisely the right shade. She has recently completed a computer course; I represent her first foray into modern office life.

  Claire types my emails and letters with reasonable accuracy, plus a certain ditsy charm. Her favourite thing of all, however, is when I want to do Internet shopping, especially if it is for home ac
cessories or clothes. She loves the challenge of tracking down the right sort of denim jacket (fully lined, hip-length, buttons most of the way up the front) or summer skirt (flared, no splits, non-flimsy material, length well below the knee).

  The only problem is that her natural price point is set a little higher than mine, so she tends to gravitate first to sites selling cut-price designer labels, whereas I would probably start with Next and work up.

  One morning Claire arrives wearing an unusual wraparound top. Some parts are blue and white stripes, some parts are blue spots on white, and others are white spots on blue.

  “That’s jolly,” I say. “Is it from Boden?”

  “Armani, actually,” she replies, and we both collapse in fits of giggles.

  Sometimes Claire brings me mail order catalogues for The White Company or Crew. Neither is quite my natural habitat, but our clash of consumer cultures is always stimulating. She scores a big hit with Laura Ashley, who turn out to sell exactly the right sort of lampshades for my small shielded low-level lamps, and she even offers to buy them for me when she is next in the nearest large town.

  “Oh, it’s no problem,” she says. “I have to wait for Persephone to finish tennis practice, so there is plenty of time to look round the shops.”

  Of all the limitations of my life, I think it is my inability to shop with which she empathises most—also, my dependence on Pete to procure random items which I cannot get mail order or online.

  “There’s simply no point sending a man to get these things,” she says severely. “Even if you give them all kinds of instructions, they will never get it quite right, will they?”

  She does her best to remedy the situation, with great kindness.

  Music

  I am back in my lair for one of the regular periods in the dark that break up my day. I am listening to a bizarrely unfunny comedy programme on Radio 4 and it’s driving me wild. Suddenly, I can’t stand it any more. I leap up and lay hands on my set. Somewhere out there, there has to be something better than this. I seize the knob and twiddle hard.

  The “Ride of the Valkyries” storms out of the radio.

  I fall about laughing—it is so unexpected—but I listen, and find I am enjoying it. Somehow I have regained my ability to listen to music alone, in my black room, without becoming an emotional basket case. The memory of departed joys, once so catastrophically evoked, threatens less now I can look forward to adding to my store. A weird inner wound, inflicted by the darkness, has healed, cauterised by the returning light.

  Feet

  One day my assistant Claire comes to do some computer work for me. I greet her with an enormous grin. “There’s something different about me today,” I say. “Can you spot it?”

  My assistant looks me up and down. My hair’s the same. My spectacles are the ones I’ve had for ages. I’m wearing clothes I’ve definitely worn before. Suddenly she sees it. “You’ve got feet!” my assistant cries.

  There at the bottom of my long silk skirt, emerging from black-legging-clad legs, a pair of pale feet, flexing their toes against the carpet like newly hatched alien young.

  I have managed to take off the nasty nylon socks I have been wearing for so long. (They are special light-protective socks, of a dense, stretchy, extra-fine fabric.) At first I only risk it for a couple of hours, then half a day. But gradually I build up. I’m not surprised that feet are the first thing I can uncover. Bony body parts—hands, face and skull—have been (thank goodness) less sensitive than fatter or more muscular ones, and I have not had to cover them. Feet are the obvious place to go next.

  I am very proud of my new feet. I thrill to the sensation of carpet and linoleum against my bare soles. Even on chillier days, I am reluctant to put on socks, and give up the sight of my liberated toes.

  Holiday

  Having worn the house for so long, I would like to try on somewhere new. But I need my environment to be just so—with curtains and blinds to control what comes in the windows, the right sort of light bulbs for the evening, a blacked-out space to sleep in and for my periodic retreats during the day.

  “What we need,” says Pete, “is a caravan.”

  My family holidays were spent in rented cottages or youth hostels, which acted as bases for strenuous hill-walking; I have never been near a caravan. Pete, however, was brought up to it, travelling as a boy to France and Spain, and all round southern England; at a time when you were still allowed to park up where you wanted in wild places, and in the New Forest ponies would come and put their noses over the half-opened caravan door.

  So we buy a caravan second-hand, and fit it out with extra blackout curtains (it already has good roller blinds). We join the Caravan Club. Pete goes on a Club towing course, and I read the Club magazine. I learn that a car and a caravan together are known as an “outfit”; that so-called Club sites are massive two-hundred-pitch affairs with cafés, lighting, mod cons and social activities, and sound terrifying; that small basic sites in out-of-the-way places are called Certificated Locations or CLs, and are much more what we are after; that “nose weight” and “tow weight” are vital considerations, and therefore a large number of lightweight accessories must be purchased, including aluminium pans and plastic plates.

  It is important, prior to caravanning, explains Pete, to make Lists of Stuff, because it is very easy to forget something, like sharp knives or deodorant, and when you are in the middle of nowhere, this is annoying. So I pore over lists with titles like “kitchen equipment,” “personal hygiene,” “cultural and social activities” and “non-perishable food,” and then, in the run-up to the holiday, become more and more excited, charging round the house ticking items off my lists and depositing them in the hall in special lightweight collapsible crates.

  We are headed for a CL just to the west of the South Downs, about an hour’s drive from home. I travel, as always, in my puppy cage, so don’t see the country until we arrive. Pete has to do all the unhitching and stabilising on his own, while I sit in the car, taking peeks at trees and grass from under my felt, and itching with anticipation. Finally Pete has the caravan door open and the step down. I burst forth and leap into the van, where I busy myself unpacking stuff from under the seats and storing it in overhead lockers, then start making lunch. Pete is outside doing manly things with gas cylinders, water pipes and toilet tanks. The peculiar nature of caravanning, in combination with my medical condition, tends towards a division of labour of a highly gendered kind. I explain to Pete that, obviously, if I were in a better state of health, I would take my turn in rolling the large plastic aquahog across the field to fill it at the water tap and in carrying the toilet tank over to the pit of turds (both tasks better done in daylight), but he merely raises an eyebrow.

  We picked the end of March for this holiday, because it is spring rather than winter, so hopefully not too cold, but close to the equinox, so that dawn is around 6 a.m. and dusk around 6 p.m. The later part of spring and the summer are no good, because dawn is so early and dusk so late, and in between is a very long day for me to get through, stuck in the van for hours.

  Nonetheless, even in March there are early starts. The alarm clock is often set for well before dawn, so that we can drive to an interesting place and be there at first light. This is pretty knackering if repeated day after day. Luckily there is a nice wood just by the site, good for dawn walks when we can’t manage to heave ourselves out of bed in the dark.

  So my holiday memories are made up of a series of dusks and dawns, each one different, with its own colour and flavour. There is the dawn when we look across fields to a horizon of small lumpy hills, and beneath a flat line of grey cloud so straight that it could have been ruled with a ruler stretches an astonishing strip of tangerine sky.

  There is the dusk when we climb Beacon Hill, and see in one direction Chichester Harbour and the sea, and in the other, the Hog’s Back near Guildford across the furry patchwork of the Weald, and a huge bird that might have been a sparrow hawk flops down a
head of us on to the short-cropped turf, and as we come down the hill the lights come on in the valley like gold and silver beads, and a strawberry sunset glows E-number pink.

  There is the dawn that starts grey and damp, stays grey and gets damper, when we walk in the woods near the caravan site, and the rain belts down all around, sizzling and hissing through the branches, blackening the bark of the trees, and only the slow brightening of the grass and moss, from grey to brilliant green, reveals that somewhere beyond the deluge, the sun is emerging above the curve of the earth.

  And there is the dawn when the world is thick with frost, and our footsteps scrunch on pale shards of grass, and our flesh is flayed by the motionless blue-tinged air. We find a field which gently rises to a line of leafless trees; behind their black filigree of branches, a pastel luminescence gives a foretaste of dawn, but the sun is not yet up. In the centre of the field, a huge oak tree, perfectly proportioned, stands alone.

  Pete likes the look of this tree. He gets out his camera and walks along a hedge to a gate at the corner of the field where he can get a better view.

  A flock of sheep, gathered near the gate, go berserk at his approach. They rush across the frozen grass, higgledy-piggledy, towards the oak tree at the centre, and deploy themselves around it in an arrangement at once so random yet harmonious, so balanced and yet so casual, that the god of photographers (Photon?) must surely have had a hand in it. Pete takes a perfect shot.

  I will always love that picture. I am so proud and pleased to have shared it with him, to be the reason why he found that field at that unholy hour, to know that the weird lifestyle that I inflict on him is not entirely inimical to Art.