Girl in the Dark Read online

  “OK,” he says. “What is it?”

  The words wait behind my lips, I feel them push against my teeth. How strange, I think, suddenly detached, that mere vibrations released into air can change the course of lives.

  I take a breath and let the words fly free. “Can I come and stay with you for a while?” I look past his head, at the kitchen shelves with their piles of plates and bowls. “I’m sorry to have to ask.”

  He says nothing. For I am asking, of course, for more than house room. I am asking him to help me interact with the outside world, and to burden himself with a girlfriend who is rapidly becoming a freak.

  “Can I think about it?” he says.

  “Of course you can.” I squeeze his hand. “Now, what shall we do about dinner?” I get up from the table, and find my legs are shaking and can hardly bear my weight.

  Later that night, I can’t sleep. I turn over in my mind what the other options might be if he says no, focusing on ruthlessly practical thoughts. I try to anaesthetise myself to the true implications of what I have done—that if he says no, it means that everything is over, and I face the future alone.

  We make inconsequential small talk over breakfast. I try to divine from his manner what is going on in his mind, but what words lurk behind his lips I cannot tell.

  Eventually he says, “I’ve thought about what you asked. I must say I didn’t sleep much last night. Anyway, I’ve decided yes.”

  Relief crashes over me in a huge clean wave. “Thank you,” I say, jumping up to hug him.

  “I think we should have a trial period,” he continues, “just to see how it goes. Say two months?”

  In my guts, I feel a clutch of dismay. So then—not completely overwhelmed with delight. But I should have expected something of this sort. Pete is organised, orderly and circumspect, in contrast to my more spontaneous nature. We complement each other—it is why things have worked well.

  So I hug him again, and force away my misgivings, and say, “Yes, that’s a sensible idea. Who knows? A few weeks in the same house and we might both go barking mad.”

  “Woof,” he says, and kisses my neck.

  IF WE COULD only see the future.

  Reacting on my face is bad, but surely hats, scarves and avoidance will be the limit of my limitations? We have no inkling of the strange reversal that awaits us, that within a year, relieving my face will transfer the problem, intensified, to the rest of me, and immure me, helpless, in the dark.

  We will look back, then, to this time as to a golden age, and if we ever could rerun this day, knowing what will come, I am quite sure he would not take me in, and as for me, I know that I would never dare to ask.

  Games to Play in the Dark

  Necessity is the mother of invention.

  In the dark you have only the materials of voice, mind and memory, and the mind’s eye, powerful or wavering depending on how you are feeling. So the games you play in the dark use words. And the words are little sparks in the darkness, because they make something flash up in your consciousness, as on a computer screen. Each one is a tiny stimulus, a mental pinprick; one of those jolts of electricity that keep you alive.

  Games to Play in the Dark 1: Transformation

  This is a game to play on your own, at night, when you can’t sleep. It disciplines the mind, requiring the kind of concentration that excludes all other thoughts.

  Think of two words with the same number of letters.

  In your mind, change one into the other by changing one letter at a time. Every new combination of letters must also make a word.

  Sometimes you will find you have gone up a blind alley and must retrace your steps to try a different route. Sometimes you will find you have gone round a long and complicated diversion when a short cut existed all the time.

  BLACK can become WHITE. BODY can become SOUL. DEATH … LIVES.

  BLACK BODY DEATH

  SLACK BODE HEATH

  SLICK BOLE HEATS

  SLICE BOLL HEAPS

  SPICE BOIL HELPS

  SPINE SOIL HELLS

  SHINE SOUL HALLS

  SHITE MALLS

  WHITE MALES

  SALES

  SAVES

  LAVES

  LIVES

  And my tour de force, the only six-letter transformation I ever achieved. One hot, airless, enclosed summer night, I turned BUTTER into CHEESE.

  BUTTER

  BATTER

  BATTED

  BAITED

  WAITED

  WHITED

  WHITES

  WHINES

  SHINES

  SPINES

  SPICES

  SLICES

  SLICKS

  CLICKS

  CLOCKS

  CHOCKS

  CHECKS

  CHEEKS

  CHEERS

  CHEERY

  CHEESY

  CHEESE

  Energy

  In my darkness, I feel full of beans. I could run for miles across open country, dance the whole night through, turn cartwheels over sea-scrubbed sand. My brain is unfogged, my mind is clear. Life and energy crackle in my limbs, my neural networks hum.

  I am the prisoner only of my skin—would I could claw that traitorous membrane from my bones.

  The darkness can sense the anomaly at its core; that lump of energised matter, throbbing against the clutch of its confinement, as though a tin can contained a beating heart.

  But the darkness has its own quiet wisdom. Slowly, subtly, it will moderate that futile energy; it has methods for restoring equilibrium.

  Eyes close when there is nothing for them to see; it is a natural response. When eyes are closed, alertness dims, thoughts turn inward, breathing slows. The body relaxes, it questions the need to be vertical, it longs to measure its length on the bed or the floor. After all, that is where, in darkness, a body feels most secure, least likely to become disorientated, to tangle with the furniture, or bash extremities against the wall.

  In my sealed-up room, the darkness whispers to my body with a thousand gentle tongues. “Rest,” it says, passing soft fingers over my eyelids, pulling me downwards with insistent hands. It has a thousand gentle mouths to press against my flesh, and suck, so tenderly, my energy away.

  I often succumb. It feels so easy and so natural, to give in to that wise, compassionate caress. But I know I should resist. I do not want to waste away, my muscles slackened, my bones honeycombed, my heart no longer used to pumping blood beyond the horizontal. I know the risks that come with inactivity, and that for me, any hospitalisation would be a searing agony, under the glare of fluorescent lights and the incomprehension of medical staff. I do not know what prolonged exposure to strong light would do to me now; it is quite possible that the reaction would prove fatal. I do not want to find out.

  So I know that I must MOVE. Luckily, in the life before, I was a seeker after bodily truths. Low back pain, the result of falling off a bus, troubled me; in the end I found relief in Pilates and the Alexander technique.

  Now I work on my core strength in the darkness. I pull in my lower abdominals after engaging my pelvic floor. I lie on my back with one knee bent and push the opposite heel vertically upwards, feeling my hamstring judder as it takes the unexpected strain. I exercise my quads by grasping one knee to my chest and extending the other leg horizontally to hover just above the carpet. I strengthen my shoulder girdle by performing the Plank, and practise Mexican waves with my toes. At other times I lie in the semi-supine position, knees bent, with my head on a couple of books, directing my back to lengthen and widen, and my knees to go forward and away.

  Storm

  I sit in the dark and listen to the storm. I hear the bitter clatter of rain against my walls, and the low boom of the wind, a strange unsettling frequency that makes bones in my skull vibrate.

  A fiercer skirl of wind alters the rhythm of the rain. It rattles harder and faster against the walls, splats on to the windowpanes. The drip-drip-drip of an overflowing gutter
starts up, then a second drip, out of kilter with the first. Unknown objects crash and roll in the street outside. A gate, ripped from its fastening, bangs back and forth, a maddening irregular handclap. The house itself is filled with cross-currents of air, which twitch along the frames of windows and suck at closed doors. The house shifts its weight around me, as if it were about to get to its feet and dance.

  My ears exult in the glorious accumulating noise, my blood foams with the energy of the storm. The world outside is trying to reach me, roused from its usual indifference. It drags its claws along the bars of my cage. It puts its mouth to my walls, and roars.

  My body has learnt to sit quietly in my room. It has learnt not to scream or sob or writhe. But my spirit swirls like the wind, surges like the rain. The wildness outside calls to the wildness within.

  “I hear you,” I cry out, in my mind. “I’m here, keep going, don’t stop.”

  When the weather is filthy, it is natural to stay snug indoors. While the storm lasts, I have the illusion of normality. I can pretend I am inside my walls by choice, that I am merely waiting until the sky has cleared, and when it does I will walk out of the door and down the street, and breathe in the smell of soaked earth, and kick the toes of my boots through puddles, and watch droplets glide from shimmering leaves.

  Slowly the rain loses its power, and the wind blows itself out. The house settles down around me and the cross-currents of air are stilled. Only the drip-drip of a gutter taps out a small coda to the vanished symphony; soon even that comes to an end.

  Music

  I have ears—why don’t I listen to music?

  And I have music, too: my CDs and tapes, brought with me from London, some lined up on the bottom shelf of the bureau within touching distance of where I sit, some mixed in with Pete’s in a cabinet downstairs.

  It is an eclectic collection. Brought up classical, I had a penchant for monumental choral and orchestral works—the complete Mahler symphonies, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the Bach B Minor Mass. I also liked chamber music that unites piano and strings in friendly combination, such as the “Archduke Trio” and the “Trout Quintet”—mellower and less austere than string quartets, or pianists on their own. As I grew older and left home, I acquired other favourites, each one introduced to me by a particular person at a particular time; taken together, a coded history of my previous life. There are albums by Pulp and the Waterboys, the Cowboy Junkies, ABBA and the Rolling Stones. There is even some AC/DC.

  And inside my little radio, just a finger’s push away, lurk endless unpredicted streams, in which you never know when your ears will come across something compelling, unexpected and new.

  I have tried. But somehow, music listened to in solitary darkness becomes devastating in its power. Undiluted by other stimuli, it overwhelms the emotional centres of my brain so quickly, so completely, that only a few bars are necessary to dissolve my careful stoicism into wild tears.

  This is the effect of all music, any music, music I have loved, music I have never heard before. The curls and twists of melody, the simplest alternation of chords, are probing fingers in my mind, pulling the lids off memories, tearing the shrouds from impossible yearnings, beaming floodlights on to departed joys. Music unhinges me, reduces to howling chaos my prudent tidying of emotion, my management of agony.

  I do not wish to writhe on the floor of my room in paroxysms of weeping. It is pointless and unaesthetic, makes me hot and bothered, doesn’t help my skin. So I forgo the liquid pleasures of music, which serve only to flood me with things I have lost, and choose instead the dry pebbles of words.

  Dream 2

  I am sitting up in bed in a strange room. The walls are covered in intensely floral wallpaper—a pattern of pink roses crowding together on a cream background. My bed is a single, and I look down its length to a window, through which there is a misty Scottish landscape—a small angle of garden fringed with orange montbretia, and penned in by rough stone walls—and beyond it, grey and purple moorland muted by white haze.

  The room smells of old furniture, musty bedding, soft rain, worn carpet, well-thumbed detective novels and dust. It is the smell of a place not in permanent occupation, but with all that is needed for temporary happiness. I realise I am in a bedroom from my childhood, in the cottage we rented for family holidays, year after year.

  In the bed I am propped up on pillows and I am holding something that weighs heavily on my arms.

  I look down, and see that it is a baby, and I know that it is mine, and that I have recently given birth. The baby has pale skin and large brown eyes, like my own. It also has a head of the most astonishing red hair, pure unvariegated flame. I am surprised, and wonder where the hair has come from. But then I remember photographs of Pete’s brother David when he was young, with hair that was the same glowing, traffic-light red.

  Not so implausible then, I think, this baby. And as I wake, and it dissolves, I remember the time when it was not implausible in real life, the time after the first disaster but before the second, the run of months that promised so much, a period of adjustment, and of hope.

  October 2005

  The woman looks at me nervously as I sit down on the opposite seat. She places her arm protectively around the small child at her side. “It’s OK,” I say, in a friendly way, “I’m not infectious. I’ve just got a light sensitivity condition, that’s all.”

  It is October, and I am on the train to London for my appointment with a dermatologist, at last. I am wearing a dark red coat, an oversized cap with a big peak in a burgundy woollen fabric and a mask I have made myself. I cut it from a dark red satin scarf, using a double layer for improved light protection, hemming it neatly, and attaching a piece of elastic each side to hook over my ears. It covers my nose, mouth and cheeks. However, it does become damp and stuffy under the satin, and my spectacles steam up. Periodically, I pull the mask down for a while, in order to cool off. The whole ensemble co-ordinates well.

  The woman opposite ignores my friendly remarks. After staring at me suspiciously, she looks out of the window for five minutes as the train trundles through undistinguished suburbs under a flat grey sky. Then, casually, as if the thought had only just occurred to her, she picks up her child and walks to the other end of the carriage.

  I shake my head and smile behind my mask. I am becoming used to strange reactions to my garb, which I now must wear every time I go outdoors, unless I wait till dusk. It does not help, of course, that this is October 2005, three months after the 7/7 bombings, and everyone is on high alert for suspicious characters on the transport system. My close friend Jonathan was in the underground carriage next to the bomb at Aldgate—he escaped with only a badly jarred spine, but he can no longer handle his commute into town. “I saw things that no one should ever see,” is all he says on the subject, but in the night, he screams.

  We are falling out of the labour market together, in a graceful backward arc, he with a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, I with my mysterious skin. We compare notes by phone on the HR departments of our employers as, slowly and inexorably, long-term sickness absence moves towards careful, procedurally correct dismissals.

  Since July, I have been living in Itchingford with Pete. I have been eating healthily, and taking exercise. I have been going for runs through the estate in the summer evenings, smelling the twilight fragrances and coming continually upon cats, sitting enigmatically on gateposts, draped along kerbstones or shooting silently across my path. Investigating Pete’s bookshelves, I have been reading novels I didn’t know before—Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the thrillers of Adam Hall. I have cleaned the house, and done our collective washing, and experimented with recipes from cookery books I’ve had for years but never used.

  And I have begun to wonder if, perhaps, the loss of everything I thought defined me—my career, my independence, the freedom to go where I want in the world—is not in fact the loss of self I feared. I have been finding parts of
me squashed and crumpled, like favourite clothes that have fallen down the back of a chest of drawers and been forgotten, and now I have the chance to smooth them out and hold them to the light.

  I know I do not have much courage. If this had not happened, despite wondering, periodically, about life beyond the civil service, I would have stayed on that escalator until the end, never quite having the guts to climb over the side. Now, with this brutal shove, I’m being given the chance to see a different me develop, while perhaps, somewhere in another part of the multi-verse, a dedicated policy expert keeps trudging into the office, growing hoary and experienced in the subtleties of power.

  I had been obsessed with my flat, with the need to make my space and live in it on my own. But over the summer just gone, I have discovered that living with Pete has been … well, fun. The realisation came to me quite suddenly, one lunchtime, as I looked across the table and found the space before my eyes filled with his form, and something lifted up inside me, like a secret inner smile.

  I am thinking over this strange heightened summer as the train pulls into Clapham Junction. As I move through the crowd on the platform, a young woman looks at my mask and mutters behind her hand to her friend: “Just like Michael Jackson!” I smile again under the clammy material. “Well, I never knew that,” I say to myself. “So—I have a celebrity accessory. Was it too much plastic surgery in his case, I wonder, or was he just worried about germs?”

  The appointment itself is an anticlimax. The dermatologist listens to my story and examines my face under her special magnifying lamp. “I do not like the look of this,” she says. “But this is not my area of expertise. I am going to refer you to a specialist photobiology unit.”

  It takes another few weeks. And when I first go there, it is simply for various biochemical tests. I provide samples of blood, urine and stools, wrapped immediately in silver foil to limit light exposure (they will be checking for porphyria, among other conditions, and the relevant chemicals decay quickly on contact with light). They tell me that I will be sent an appointment for light testing, some time in the spring.