Girl in the Dark Read online

  With some, I just talk about light bulbs, and that is the end of the matter. With others, I start off talking about light bulbs, and we end up talking about our shared experience of falling away from the normal, about books and families and politics and ideas; we keep on talking.

  My telephone friends speak of pain, debility and nausea, of fatigue and fog in the brain—but in absolute terms, their activities, unfouled by the darkness, are less restricted than my own.

  Down the telephone wires my friends give me massive transfusions of life. I come off the phone, every time, more cheerful than before.

  Tales of Telephone Friends 1: Véronique

  Véronique is one telephone friend whom I did know in person in the life before. I met her when she came from France to study for a year in the UK. Always a brilliant girl, in the league tables so favoured by the French, she invariably finished high, receiving the best marks in the country for her baccalaureate and hoping for an elevated position in the national examination which must be taken by all, in France, who wish to work in museums.

  Fascinated by objects since her childhood, Véronique specialised in the art of the Pacific Islands. But her curatorial dreams were destroyed by long spells of depression, which then began to alternate with manic crises. She became familiar with the insides of psychiatric institutions, and was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disease.

  “This morning I have been to see my shrink,” Véronique says, on the telephone. “The appointment is only fifteen minutes, so one has to talk very fast. He is not ideal, my shrink, but he is the only behaviourist in my city.”

  I ask Véronique if there are charities in France that support people with mental health problems.

  “There is a charity to support the relatives of people with mental health problems,” Véronique says, “to help them cope with the stigma.” She often talks about her dilemma, as she tries to meet new people, over what she should tell them about her condition. Merely to admit that she is not working can provoke a surprising degree of moral condemnation; if she then reveals the reason, the reactions range from horrified withdrawal to the advocacy of New Age therapies, instructions to pull herself together, because everyone has mood swings, or a recommendation to submit herself to the Roman Catholic Church. Friendly, polite and keen to please, Véronique finds it difficult to give her interlocutors a suitably robust response.

  Véronique attends various adult education classes, “… but they are very female—the only people I meet are elderly ladies!”

  “What classes are you going to?” I ask.

  “Ceramics, life-drawing,” says Véronique, “and Tai Chi.”

  “Perhaps you should try something with more appeal to men. What about a walking group?”

  “I have joined a walking group, but it also consists only of ladies.”

  Véronique and I speculate regarding what French men might be doing, as they certainly are not attending adult education classes.

  Eventually Véronique solves the problem by joining an Internet group called “On va sortir,” where people link up to go to concerts, exhibitions and so on.

  One day she announces that she has met a young man called Nicolas, a counsellor and therapist. Relationship counselling is one of his specialities.

  “He has classic Alsatian good looks,” says Véronique, who, as a native of Alsace, frequently uses this adjective. I really should be used to it by now, but I cannot help myself: every time Véronique says it, large brown dogs with pointed ears lope across the display screen of my mind.

  “For our third date,” says Véronique, “he asked me to go with him to a sauna in Germany. There was a sign on the wall telling people not to talk, so we sat on our towels in a huge room, in silence, surrounded by naked Germans. It was spooky.”

  “So … were you naked as well?” I ask faintly, feeling very buttoned-up and English.

  “Oh yes, but that’s quite normal. In French saunas everyone is naked, but at least one is able to chat.”

  It is for the joy of such unexpected vignettes that I am indebted to Véronique.

  It soon becomes clear that Nicolas is more interested in analysing their relationship than in having it; specifically he is interested in improving Véronique so that she becomes a more suitable partner for him. Even eager-to-please Véronique realises this is rather one-sided, and they part.

  Véronique’s English is very good, but every so often she struggles to find an exact translation, or I use an English idiom that she does not understand. We have great fun working out the French equivalents for “white lies” (pieux mensonges), “public spending cuts” (la rigueur), “champagne socialist” (la gauche caviar) and many other fine expressions.

  Tales of Telephone Friends 2: Tom

  Tom was a partner in an IT company, until, in his late thirties, he became ill, in a way similar to, but not as severe as, my own. No longer able to function in modern office environments—although never, luckily, affected by daylight itself—he has had to find another, home-based life.

  His partners in the company buy him out and he decides to use some of the money to build an eco-house for himself, his wife and three children. It will be extremely energy-efficient, and its running costs will be exceptionally low.

  I hear about the progress of the house. “The difficult thing,” says Tom, “is making the whole place properly airtight, so that you retain the maximum amount of heat. I’m trying to get hold of special seals for the edges of the windows, and for the joins between the walls and the floor.”

  “If it’s completely airtight,” I ask, “what about ventilation?”

  “There’s a single air inlet with a small electric pump. In the summer you can cool the air coming in and in winter you can heat it, if you need to, but it’s amazing how much heat human bodies generate, if you keep it in and don’t let it escape.”

  “If the pump broke, would you suffocate?” I ask with interest, thinking of a possible plot for an eco-whodunnit.

  “It would take five to six days,” says Tom, who always works things like this out. “So you’d probably start to notice before you finally expired. I’ve installed carbon dioxide monitors, just in case.”

  Most of the windows in the house face south, to maximise solar gain. A system of blinds prevents overheating. Shade creepers grow up over the porch in summer, and die back in winter, when sunlight is scarce. I have never seen the house, but I have an image of it in my mind as a live thing, a reptile basking in the sun, sucking into its belly every life-giving ray.

  Tom is not a fan of conventional wisdom. If he wants to know about something, he researches it himself. He rigs up a computer in an old barn, so that the image that would appear on the monitor is projected on a large scale on to a white wall, and he can sit at a keyboard far enough away from it to avoid discomfort. He thinks the Internet will result in social change on a scale that has scarcely yet been imagined, bringing people together so they can slip out from under the grasp of institutions and governments. People will manage their health without doctors, teach themselves things without schools, share and analyse data to find patterns that would never emerge in traditional scientific trials.

  I am stimulated by these new ideas, exhilarated by Tom’s optimistic view of the future, encouraged by the chance it gives for people written off by the system to work out their own salvation. But I’m not completely convinced. I mistrust anything that claims to transcend, once and for all, human nature, history and power relations, and offer unmixed liberation. “Don’t you think,” I ask him, “that all this cyber-utopianism, or whatever, could become—well, a bit ideological?”

  He doesn’t, really. He simply tells me about yet more startling developments in computing and on the Web, and also about what futurologists think will happen next, as computers become smaller and smaller and more and more powerful. Eventually a person will be able to download their entire consciousness, and become an eternal, inorganic intelligence, removing the need for a body, and all the me
ssy fallibility of flesh.

  Mother

  My mother is coming to visit.

  The first sign is the sound of a taxi drawing up. Then there is a banging of car doors, a rustle of bags and a loud cheerful voice in the street outside.

  There is more banging and stomping as she unlocks the front door and comes inside.

  “Hello-o?” she calls. “Now stay in the black, don’t get overexposed.”

  I come downstairs. In the hall, my mother is divesting herself of a black metallic walking stick, a backpack, a shoulder bag, a carrier bag, a purple coat and a turquoise hat and scarf.

  “I’ve brought various things,” she says, delving into her bags. “I went into Sainsbury’s opposite the station and bought you some yellow chrysanthemums. You ought to be able to see those in the gloom.” She comes into the living room and gives a yell as she walks into the coffee table. (In the dim light, visitors entering from the bright world outside go temporarily blind.)

  “I’ll just stand here and give my eyes time to adjust,” my mother says, handing me a lumpy package. She has brought some raw beets, which she is going to make into borscht for lunch. (Raw beets, strangely, are a metropolitan luxury, very difficult to get hold of in my part of Hampshire.) She has also brought a new mug with a nice strawberry pattern, and some posh jam as a present for Pete, who is a connoisseur of conserves.

  My mother sits on the tall chair in the kitchen, chopping up beetroot, while I make cups of tea. She holds forth on:

  1. Something outrageous that the government is doing (her indignation is fresh, as she bought a paper to read on the train).

  2. Problems she is having with the venue for the music course that she runs twice a year. Many of her punters are past their first youth, but the well-known boarding school she hires has once again assigned them rooms with bunk-beds.

  3. My brother, who is too amenable, and can’t say no to anyone, which means he takes on too many musical commitments and doesn’t get enough exercise.

  While the soup cooks, we go upstairs into the black to talk and play games.

  After lunch my mother sits down at the piano, and the noise and movement, the bumps and crashes and exclamations, simply fall away, as if a live electric cable has, by connecting to the keyboard, earthed itself; she plays with lucid musical intelligence, serenity and joy. The music comes up through the floor of my dark room, filling it with rippling sound. With human company attached, I can listen, and not be overwhelmed.

  When I was growing up, our weekly piano lesson periodically descended into sulking and rage as I tried to master some new aspect of technique. For a while, there was an enterprise known as the “Family Newspaper,” written by all family members on large blank sheets of newsprint with felt-tip pens. “Anna is still struggling with the scale of F major,” my mother reported in one of her news columns. I was indignant. An entry appeared in the next edition in irregular purple letters: “Mummy is still struggling with the Brahms—Handel variations,” it read, referring to a large and virtuoso concert piece.

  In my mother I see the source of parts of myself, and also elements so alien that they leave me mystified. Yet my mother is the person to whom I say things about my situation that I say to no one else.

  She tells me that another of my cousins has had a baby.

  “What is that to me?” I ask. “I don’t want to know things that remind me that I am a failure.”

  She tells me of an acquaintance who has been rushed to hospital, because he was coughing up blood.

  “At least he can go to hospital,” I say.

  My mother says she has spoken to her friend Eleanor, who has had psychiatric problems for years, and now lives alone, depressed, and hardly ever goes out.

  “Can she see the sky outside her window?” I ask. “Can she open her front door and walk along her street? Can she turn on the telly whenever she wants to and watch it for as long as she likes? Then she should bow down and kiss the ground in gratitude.”

  “I have tried to tell her about you,” says my mother.

  I would not speak like this to Pete or to my friends, and do so to my mother only rarely. Told of others’ joys or misfortunes, I usually respond with friendly interest or appropriate concern. If there is a small dark movement of the heart, it is suppressed, and I find I soon feel, sincerely, what I am saying.

  But with my mother I become a child again. “It’s not fair,” I yell, in more sophisticated language, and my desperate, incontinent jealousy floods out, hot and foul and unconstrained.

  What will I do, what will I do, when the time comes, that must inevitably come, and my feisty, bustling mother is dead?

  Games to Play in the Dark 3: Mind Mastermind

  This is a game for two players. It requires a high degree of logic, concentration and memory, providing an aerobics class for the neural networks.

  Each player thinks of a four-letter word, of the polite kind. They take it in turns to attempt to guess each other’s word. For every word they ask, the other player gives them a score from 0 to 3 representing the number of letters in the correct positions.

  The first to guess the other’s word correctly wins.

  You have to remember your word. You have to remember the words you’ve asked. You have to remember the scores you got for them.

  Then you apply logic, probability and low cunning to run the other person’s word to earth before your own cover is blown. Between two experienced players the game has the beauty and ruthlessness of single combat.

  I dream of four-letter words. I search my mind for the most difficult and unusual, listen for them as I absorb my talking books. I fall in love with words like ECRU and HYMN and GNAW; with AWRY, with CHIC and with BULB. I start a small mental stash of the most fiendish in preparation for future competitions with my mother, who is my most frequent and fearsome opponent. My mother is notorious among her friends and relations for being extremely able and competitive at all sorts of games. I can beat her, but I need all my wits about me, and when I manage it, my mother, desensitised to victory, will exclaim, “You always win!”

  One day, a game goes like this:

  Mother: BELT.

  Me: None. PATE.

  Mother: None. MUTE.

  Me: None. MOOR.

  Mother: None. NOSY.

  Me: None. SUET.

  Mother: None. SHIP.

  Me: None. CRAW.

  Mother: None. DAMN. That’s my go, not a comment, by the way.

  Me: None. VEIL.

  Mother: How would you be spelling that?

  Me: V … E … I … L, as in veil and unveil.

  Mother: None. EVER.

  Me: None.

  Mother: Hmm. I seem to be getting nowhere fast.

  Me: Well, I’m not getting anywhere either. Let’s see, I haven’t tried a Y at the end yet. ALLY.

  Mother: None. INTO.

  Me: None.

  Mother: This must be a very unusual word, to have hit no letters at all.

  Me: It isn’t, particularly. Is yours?

  Mother: I wouldn’t say so.

  Me: ECHO.

  Mother: That’s a nice word. None. Perhaps I ought to try some unusual letters. LYNX.

  Me: None. LYNX to you.

  Mother: None. BUZZ.

  Me: None. UGLI with an I—it’s a kind of fruit, I think.

  Mother: I know what an UGLI is, thank you. None. GREW.

  Me: None. ISLE, as in I … S … L … E.

  Mother: Hmm, silent letters, eh? None.

  Me: Are you sure I’ve heard of this word?

  Mother: Of course you have. Have I heard of yours?

  Me: Yes—it’s a perfectly normal word.

  Mother: (Getting desperate) Goodness, I don’t know—perhaps the vowels are in different places. What about OBOE?

  Me: None. (Equally desperate) WHAM.

  Mother: None.

  Me: This is bonkers. Are you sure you haven’t given me false information?

  Mother: I don’t think
so. What about you? TAXI.

  Me: No, I haven’t. TAXI has none.

  What has happened, of course, is that we have given each other the same word HIGH, and, both being devilishly clever and devious, have avoided asking words with Is and Hs in the relevant places, in order not to give the other person ideas.

  Finally, finally, somebody says FISH, and gets two points. The Mexican stand-off is over and, very quickly, all is revealed.

  People

  Other people visit me, from time to time. Mostly they are people I am sure of, people who will see the girl through the darkness, who will not be fazed by the strangeness of the situation, not be so shocked and flabbergasted that they become distressing companions.

  A person called Alicia comes, but only once. “I don’t know how you cope, I couldn’t,” she says, almost accusingly, over and over again. I wonder what I am expected to do: to scream the whole day long, perhaps, or run down the street in the midday sun in some futile show of defiance and then burn for weeks. Or does my visitor mean, but cannot bring herself to say, that in her view this is a life not worth living, that I should end it, and not embarrass people by dragging my pitiful scrap of existence on through the months and the years?

  But for the most part, people—of the right kind—are good. For them I put on my corset of cheerfulness, a solid serviceable garment. It holds in the bulgings and oozings of emotion, and soon I find they are, temporarily, stilled.

  People make me tidy up my psyche, as one might order the magazines on the coffee table before a visitor arrives, and afterwards, for a while, they will stay that way, before entropy reasserts its hold.