Girl in the Dark Read online

  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.

  Domestic

  “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.

  Dreams

  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.

  Dream 1

  I am on a train just outside Waterloo Station. It is packed with commuters—I am lucky to have got a window seat. I look out over the ridges and furrows of railway tracks, bunching into a thick brown swathe as they approach the terminus. Through the gaps between office buildings, I glimpse the silver skeleton of the London Eye.

  I am dreaming my journey to work. When the train pulls into platform 2, I am swept out of the carriage and over the concourse by a surge of dark suits. Everyone seems purposeful and determined, carrying briefcases and bags, and walking in the same direction. I am borne down the steps into York Road, under the railway, and up on to Hungerford Bridge.

  The panorama of London opens out around me—the Southbank Centre behind and to my right, the Houses of Parliament upstream on the opposite bank, Embankment Gardens, Charing Cross Station, the Savoy Hotel. The huge grey Thames, plunging through the centre of the city, creates a glorious canyon of light, distance and rushing air, an antidote to boxy offices and car-packed streets.

  In my dream the sky above me is full of bustling white clouds, and the river beneath me seethes with porpoises and whales, rolling and basking, and suddenly surfacing, so that water pours down their smooth grey sides.

  I speed over the bridge, full of confidence and hope. I know I’ve been away from work, but I’m sure I’m better now. I enter my office through huge gold-coloured doors which swing open at my approach. But my colleagues appear to be the same. “Glad to see you back,” they say. “There’s a lot on at the moment. The Minister needs a briefin
g paper by ten o’clock. We’ve set you up in a desk in the corner, so you can keep the overhead lights switched off.”

  “That’s sensible,” I think. I go to my desk, settle into my chair and turn on my machine.

  But I can’t make it work. Things come up on the screen that I didn’t type in at the keyboard. Files and applications open and close randomly. The mouse is recalcitrant under my hand, while the cursor zips round the screen. Thousands of emails pour down upon me.

  I wake up in a panic. “I must get that computer sorted out,” I think. “But at least I got to work. That was pretty good.” Then I open my eyes into darkness, and realise that I have gone nowhere, and remember that I am not even in London any more.

  And I think back to the life I had before, a life of very ordinary components, with the usual balance of frustration and contentment, the standard complement of light and shade. And I remember the beginnings of the darkness, and where it planted its first roots, smack into the centre of that life.

  April 2005

  I am at my computer, typing hard. Around me banks of desks stretch out, studded with hunched bodies. The ends of rows are marked with lurid rose-pink filing cabinets, a strange attempt by management to make the new high-density seating arrangement seem vibrant and fun.

  Fingers tap on keyboards, mouths mutter into phones, printers burp and heave. The low ceiling presses down on us, pocked with fluorescent squares. People cross the space from time to time, to discuss things discreetly with colleagues. An intriguing lone declaration breaks periodically from the well-modulated hum:

  “Tell Press Office that’s all we can say.”

  Or “Hey, where’s Chris this afternoon?”

  Or “Bloody HR are driving me mad.”

  It is the headquarters of the Department of Work and Pensions, a week before the general election in 2005.

  Everyone expects Labour to win, though with a reduced majority. Tony Blair will take the opportunity to reshuffle his team, and we will get yet another Minister for Pensions, who will have to be got up to speed. I am writing a paper for this unknown politician, currently on the campaign trail in Glasgow, or Bolton, or Northampton, festooned with balloons and red rosettes, and answering awkward questions about the war in Iraq.

  Lucid paragraphs flow on to my screen. I know what the Minister needs to know, and how to explain the complicated bits so that even an idiot will understand. Facts and arguments are easily accessible, neatly marshalled inside my head.

  And inside another part of my head: chaos, panic and terror.

  On and on. Round and round. Thoughts writhing beneath my calm, professional exterior like a basement of black snakes. I cannot lose my job. I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this. I have to keep going. How can I keep going? I cannot lose my job.

  I love my job—it is at times bizarre, frustrating and surreal, but always interesting: the curious compound language of cricketing metaphor and management jargon, the strange parliamentary procedures, the politicians’ egos, the old, old certainties of power.

  And I love its location—just a little way east of the stone desolation of Whitehall, which we nonetheless visit frequently, to see our ministers, or the suave types at the Treasury, or en route to the Palace of Westminster itself. In my lunch break I can walk easily to Covent Garden, where I mooch zombie-like among the clothes shops, filling my eyes with colour and pattern to blot out the strains of the day. At a tiny takeaway run by two Italians, I find my favourite office lunch—a baked potato with tuna and black olive pâté, in generous, gleaming scoops. Even closer is Embankment Gardens, a slender tongue of city nature, where, under pressure to unknot some problem by some ridiculous deadline, I wander among the bright flowerbeds and the big mature trees, and gain new insight and perspective.

  My parents, both professional musicians, were precariously self-employed, and my childhood was punctuated by periodic crises when my father would announce dramatically that the orchestra (he was a cellist with the London Philharmonic) was about to go under, and we were all going to end up in the workhouse. It never quite happened—the orchestra teetered on from one savage grant reduction to the next—but perhaps the whole experience had a psychological effect, predisposing me to join the civil service in search of boring job security and defined benefit pensions.

  I have just bought a flat, after years of false starts and deals falling through (roof repairs, psychopathic neighbours, asbestos, leases that couldn’t be extended—the usual stuff experienced by people trying to buy non-modern one-bedroom flats in unposh parts of south London). Now, at last, all the weird things I’ve accumulated over the years, without having anywhere to put them—a gold sunburst clock, a leopard-print teapot, vintage curtains, an upright piano—are coming out of boxes and cupboards and the spare room at my mother’s, and finding their proper place. All my pent-up interior design projects are bursting forth—I’ve always wanted a yellow-painted kitchen, and a wall full of arty postcards, and a big curly iron bed.

  So I cannot lose my job. I cannot lose my job. I cannot lose this flat, this longed-for realisation of my dream.

  At first, it happened only occasionally. I had the odd bad day, then things reverted to normal. Gradually, the bad days became more frequent, they oozed into each other, they coalesced. The good days became the exceptions, small islands of diminishing hope.

  Now even the islands have gone.

  So what is it, this strange, unprecedented thing? Simply this: when I sit in front of a computer screen, the skin on my face burns.

  Burns?

  Burns like the worst kind of sunburn. Burns like someone is holding a flame-thrower to my head.

  To the left of my computer is my desperate short-term solution: a small electric fan, propped on a directory, angled to blow air continuously across my face. As soon as I shift away from the airstream, the pain comes thumping back.

  I’ve been to the doctor’s and explained the problem. The GP, puzzled and concerned, has put me on a waiting list to see a dermatologist. Perhaps, in the interim, I should take sick leave—but I am possessed by a strange delusion of indispensability. I honestly believe that if I were not here, this important paper about pensions would not be written so well; the new Minister, robbed of my lucid expertise, would fail to grasp the issues; decisions would not be taken, implementation dates would slip.

  I don’t want to let down my team. And I do not wish even to consider the possibility that the mysterious process afoot in my flesh could ultimately divide me from the job I love—the job which has formed me over the past ten years, which pays for all the structures of my life.

  If for one millisecond the veil of the future could be raised, and I could catch one glimpse of the terrifying tunnel ahead, I would be immune to any claims of conscience, any sense of loyalty, any of the contumely heaped upon shirkers. I would run from that office, down John Adam Street, up the steps of Hungerford Bridge, over the river to where the homeless people live, as if a fiend pursued me; I would abandon at one stroke my job, my mortgage and my comfortable life, and I would stay with them, sleeping on cardboard and swaddled in blankets, but still possessed of the freedom of the city, and with the sky above my head.

  But I do not know my future, and am sensible only of the pressures of the present. So I stay at my post, typing fiercely, the fan feebly cooling my face.

  May 2005

  “Welcome,” says the Chair of the meeting, an avuncular type with large black-framed spectacles and a balding head. He is known for his humane and relaxed approach, which he is going to need, because this is a meeting at which thirty line managers attempt to rank staff in order of performance, for the purposes of end-of-year reports.

  The meeting is taking place in a subterranean, windowless room, with off-white fibreboard walls, a dirty grey carpet and ferocious fluorescent lights. Grey tables are set out round the edges, in the form of a hollow square. People are tanking up on sour-smelling coffee, and looking round suspiciously at their colleagues
. I am, unusually, pleased to be here, because it means several hours away from my computer, during which my face will have some respite. Although someone has deliberately chosen a particularly horrible room, presumably to encourage us to reach consensus, it is not going to happen quickly.

  “But does he really go the extra mile? I’ve come across him in meetings, and I have to say he lacks sparkle.”

  “And if you compare him with Anthony, who’s really shone this year …”

  “Actually, my team have had a lot of problems dealing with Anthony. It seems impossible to get him to co-operate in any way. And he’s always out at lunch.”

  “Surely the key deciding factor should be: does he live the Departmental values?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, that’s not going to get us anywhere.”

  “Well, what do you suggest?”

  It is a hopeless task. The staff under consideration, although all of the same grade, do wildly different jobs in different parts of the department. Some are known to other line managers and some are unknown, while others have been glimpsed across a crowded meeting room or encountered in the pub, and entirely subjective judgements have been formed. Some managers prove to be cunning and devious advocates, others are far too honest, and easily put on the defensive.

  Truly, it is the meeting from hell. After three hours I am still trying to follow the discussion and intervene where it would help my staff. But something strange is happening which is claiming more and more of my attention. There are no screens in this fiercely lit, subterranean box, yet my face is on fire, nonetheless. I find myself sitting forward, elbows on the table, hands pressed to my cheeks, trying to give my face protection, or at least the comfort of touch. There are bottles of water dotted around, and I pour myself glass after glass.