Girl in the Dark Page 8

  People remind me of my true shape, the particular bent of my mind, the curve of my wit; that I have substance, though I move wraithlike among shadows, that the years before the darkness laid down rich sediment which has not been washed away.

  But there are not enough people. In fairness, I have not made it easy, for them or for myself. Moving to Itchingford from London when I did, I placed geographical, economic and psychological barriers between us, as well as the more subtle ones of divergence of experience, of loss of common ground. To visit me without a car, they must take one or two trains, at least, and then, from the railway station, a twenty-minute cab ride, or a highly circuitous bus. The ones who visit with a car must drive along the M25 and down the M3, length of journey variable, depending on the traffic. In Itchingford itself, the time between my coming and the second disaster has not been long enough, and I have not been well enough, to make new friends, at least of the degree of intimacy required to invite comfortably into tragedy.

  Pete, with his own friends, sticks to generalities about our situation, and is vague about the particulars. Constitutionally self-contained and reticent on private matters, he does not, in any context, easily ask for help.

  Alex comes to visit, the person for whom I arranged “Little Donkey” in happier times. She says, “I think you’re amazing, you cope so well. You are such a strong woman.”

  That is the sort of thing I like, being only human, after all.

  Jonathan, my once-close friend, does not come. He recovers, at least partially, from the bombing, and gets a high-powered job near his home on the far side of the capital, to which he can commute by car. “I must come and visit you,” he says, once or twice. It does not happen; soon phone calls also cease.

  He was the person, more than any other, with whom I shared my London life. For eight years we would meet after work to go to a play in Shaftesbury Avenue, a concert at the Southbank, or a film at the NFT—all within walking distance of our office—or we would have a meal at our favourite Turkish restaurant, where I would eat too many olives and too much hummus, and give myself indigestion.

  Friendship plants itself as a small unobtrusive seed; over time, it grows thick roots that wrap around your heart. When a love affair ends, the tree is torn out quickly, the operation painful but clean. Friendship withers quietly, there is always hope of revival. Only after time has passed do you recognise that it is dead, and you are left, for years afterwards, pulling dry brown fibres from your chest.

  MY VISITORS CAN never find the door. They lose their sense of direction completely, and try to get out of the wardrobe, or through the mirror. “Hold still a minute,” I say, to stop them blundering about and banging into things. I move quickly, place my hand unerringly on the door handle, and release my confused visitor, who has been fluttering like a bird.

  Knitting

  I am always trying to think of new things to do in the dark. Hungry for stuff to stuff the empty black hours, my mind ploughs up and down the fields of my experience, turning over the soil of all I’ve ever done, in case some nugget should rise to the surface, and could be put to use.

  I have a memory of doing something with my hands, something repetitious yet satisfying; something I had to look at to start with to get right, but that after a while I could carry on subconsciously. I remember twisting wool around two needle points, slipping one downwards just enough, allowing one loop to slide over the other, to catch and hold.

  I was never good at crafty things when young, being neither meticulous nor neat, but I was definitely better at knitting than anything else. I had even, over two years, painstakingly completed a stripy jumper. Large, bulky and indubitably home-made, it came to a sad end in a charity shop; over the period of its making, I had become an excruciatingly self-conscious sixteen-year-old, and could not bring myself to wear it.

  However, I remember the grim satisfaction of generating row after row; there was always visible reward for application in terms of inches produced, clear woolly proof of virtue.

  Could this perhaps be just the thing to justify my useless life? I mention my idea to my friend Pam, who is an enthusiastic producer of garments for nephews and nieces. She turns up with a pair of large needles and a bag of thick bright turquoise wool, and gives me a refresher course in the gloom downstairs, nipping into the light of the kitchen to demonstrate the finer points.

  The plan is that I am going to knit a scarf, straight up and down, no complicated shaping, in knit two, purl two rib.

  I sit on the floor of my room, cross-legged, leaning my back against the side of the bed. To start with I think I can tell the difference between a stitch that has been knitted in the previous row, and therefore wants to be purled (to maintain the ribbed effect), and a stitch that has been purled, and therefore wants to be knitted—partly by feel, and partly by keeping rigorous count in my head. My first few inches, taken downstairs to be examined, have worked well.

  But gradually I get more and more confused. I become convinced that a particular sensation of woollen loops under my fingers means I must knit the next stitch rather than purl it, and I proceed for a few rows on that assumption. Then the texture starts to feel different, and I lose my nerve, and try another policy. I count my stitches—but then I find I have an odd and not an even number.

  Something has gone very wrong.

  I leave my darkness and examine what I have produced. For a band measuring about a couple of inches, the neat ribbed stripes have gone haywire, all bobbly and uneven, as though affected by some lichenous growth.

  Stupidly, I do not rip it out. Instead, I say to myself, “Oh well, it doesn’t have to be perfect; this is just my practice scarf.” And I correct my approach, and concentrate hard, and over the next couple of days (I don’t do it all the time) I produce another few inches of rib.

  And then I look at it again, with the horrible messed-up band, and begin to wonder: who will wear this scarf anyway, why am I doing this at all, what is it for, when a better one could easily be bought? And I come to a halt, caught between two contradictory impulses—not wanting to continue, when the article will have such a flaw, but entirely unable to contemplate unravelling the rows which represent so many hours of slow and solitary toil. And it could so easily go wrong, again.

  My fingers falter, the needles drop from my hands. I roll up and impale the ball of wool, stow the knitting in its plastic bag, and reach it on to the top of the wardrobe, so that it is well out of the way, even in the darkness. It has become a tangled web of wool and emotion, and working out what to do about it is currently beyond my powers.

  Dream 3

  I have one recurring dream. In the dream, I wake in the night. There has been an earthquake, or a violent storm. It has torn a huge jagged hole in the wall that runs along the side of my bed. The bed is tilted at a crazy angle, the head end canted downwards, sticking through the hole and into the world outside. Rain is falling on my face, wetting my pillow and my sheets; a night breeze caresses my hair and swirls the raindrops against my skin.

  Then I jolt awake for real. Good God, I think, what on earth am I doing? There’s a hole in the side of my bedroom, and I’m just lying here, exposing my skin to the light in the street outside. I must be mad. I reach my hand out to measure the breach in my wall—and my palm finds nothing but unbroken painted plaster, smooth and bland and dry.

  I slam my hand against the wall. I roll my body again and again, smashing my bones against its cool, implacable façade.

  How did I end like this? I pick over the months that led up to my final boxing-in, attempting to impose order on a sequence of events that, lived through, passed in a horrific accelerating blur.

  Now I can recollect them in tranquillity; I have the time.

  Oh I have the time, indeed.

  April 2006

  I lie on a bed wrapped in thick black felt from head to foot, one portion of my upper arm exposed, while a huge angled lamp, warm like a miniature sun, plays different frequencies of light upon my n
aked skin.

  “It’s my face that reacts,” I say to the technician, after she has unwrapped me. “Not the rest of me, thank goodness.”

  “Oh, everyone has light testing,” she replies. “Just to eliminate things. It’s routine.”

  She gets me to sit upright, this time with my back exposed, and draws a grid on it with black felt-tip pen. She fires a particular frequency into each square using a smaller, more focused device. I can see what is happening in a mirror—there is green light and blue light and orange light and red light.

  “It’s my face,” I say again, but this does not seem to be important at this stage.

  “You can discuss your results with the consultant tomorrow,” says the technician.

  I get dressed, put on my hat, and mask up for the journey home.

  DR. OCELOT IS a very typical consultant. He is tall and well-made, with regular features and piercing eyes. He has thick, sleek, executive hair, distinguished silver in colour. He has an obsequious student with him in his consulting room, short, pudgy and asymmetrical, but who clearly hopes one day to gleam and glare like his mentor.

  “According to your results,” drawls Dr. Ocelot, flipping through papers on his desk, “you don’t have lupus, porphyria or XP, which are the usual causes of light sensitivity. Will you describe again what the problem seems to be?”

  I go through what has happened to my face, how it first reacted to computer screens, went on to fluorescent lights, and is now giving me trouble with daylight. I demonstrate my hat and mask.

  “And what exactly are the symptoms you experience?”

  I explain about the burning and indicate the red patches.

  “And what precisely do you mean by burning?”

  I am starting to lose patience. Why is the default setting of doctors always disbelief? Do they really think I’ve jumped through hoops to get here merely because of some minor discomfort? Or that I’ve travelled to the clinic in my outlandish gear as some sort of exhibitionist fashion statement? Even the student is practising his sceptical expression, modelling himself upon the master.

  I say, “It is like someone is holding a blowtorch in front of my face.”

  That gets them. There is an interval of shocked silence; the image seems to have punched through the professional barrier between us, to have made them feel what I am feeling, if only for a moment.

  Dr. Ocelot leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers and gazing at the ceiling. “We do occasionally come across cases like this,” he acknowledges. “The diagnosis is light- and computer-exacerbated seborrhoeic dermatitis. It is not clear what causes it. I am going to prescribe beta blockers to reduce blood flow, steroid creams and an antifungal wash. Come back and see us in six to eight weeks. You won’t be seeing me, though. I am going to take up a post in the USA. You will be in the care of my colleague, Dr. Scrivener, whom I think you met briefly yesterday.”

  I did. Dr. Scrivener is much younger, slim and neat with thinning hair. He has a gentle pink-and-white complexion and an air of genuine benevolence and concern.

  I avoid smiling only by forcibly holding down the corners of my mouth.

  Later, I leave the hospital pharmacy, weighed down with pills and unguents in several paper bags.

  May 2006

  I wash with the antifungal wash. I apply the steroid creams. I take the pills. My face experiences some relief. It becomes less rough and raw, the reactions are dampened down, the redness fades away.

  After a few days, I start to notice a slight puffy sensation in my arms and legs—it feels like a mild allergic reaction. I think nothing of it—my face is improving, and that’s the main thing. I carry on applying the stuff to my skin.

  Early May: I am on a train into London, to attend my piano teaching course.

  I am in a window seat, my bare forearm stretched out on the table in front of me, palm upward. It is bare because the day is unexpectedly warm and sunny, a sudden foretaste of summer, and I’m wearing a top with sleeves that only come down as far as the elbow.

  And I feel a sort of roughed-up sensation on my arm, as though someone is rubbing it with sandpaper. And I peer at my flesh, but can see nothing unusual. And it still feels odd, when I get home that night.

  I will always remember that arm—pale and creamy smooth, emerging from a turquoise cotton sleeve on to the grey Formica table top, all the colours vivid in the light streaming through the train window; and that odd rough sensation, the first gentle touch from the tentacles of hell.

  A few days later I am in the passenger seat of the car Pete is driving. It is nearly noon on a sunny day; the sun slants down through the windscreen. I am wearing trousers—a thin sort of cord. I notice a rough, burning feeling on the tops of my thighs. It lasts for the rest of the day.

  Middle of May: I am on my evening run. A brilliant deep blue empty sky, warm grey tarmac under my feet, low golden rays that make the boring brickwork of the boxy houses blaze, mixed scents of white blossoms.

  Suddenly I feel strangely hot all over, and break into a clammy sweat. I stop and stand on the pavement, disconcerted. It is as if something inside me is trying to get out through my skin, not just in one place, but everywhere. I turn and run for home by the shortest route. That night, I tingle all over for hours, and then go deathly cold.

  I still do not make the connection. I am focused on my face: that is where light affects me, surely not elsewhere, and my face has got much better. And on the rest of me, unlike my face, there is nothing to see—no redness, no roughness; my covering is intact. It must be some sort of allergy, I conclude, and apply myself to working out what I have eaten, or what I have inhaled, or what I have put on my skin. I go to the GP and am given a referral to an allergy clinic several weeks hence. I become fixated on chlorine in the bathwater when I have a bath one Sunday morning, a decadent luxurious soak in a sun-filled bathroom, and burn afterwards, for hours.

  I miss the final sessions of my piano course—feeling too weird, too often, to risk the trips up to town. The organisers say they will still let me qualify, if I send a tape of my performance of the sonata I’ve been analysing, and write an in-depth essay on the use of twentieth-century piano music for teaching beginner and intermediate students, which I undertake to do.

  Towards the end of May, Pete goes away to a conference. Before he leaves, he prints out from the computer the wedding invitations we have designed, plus a set of address labels, and information sheets for the guests. It is my job, in his absence, to get everything sent out.

  So one day after lunch, I take all the mats off the dining table next to the south-facing French windows, and wipe it clean of sticky food. I bring down the different piles from the computer room upstairs, lay them out before me, and set to work. First, I stick labels on to the pile of envelopes. Then, taking each envelope in turn, I write on to an invitation the relevant names, fold up a sheet of information, and slip both inside.

  As I do it, my skin starts to prickle and burn.

  Reach—write—fold.

  Reach—write—fold.

  Burn.

  Neat white rectangles are building up around me, covering one end of the table, falling on to the chairs, spreading across the carpet like stepping stones.

  Reach—write—fold.

  Burn.

  And I am overwhelmed by the hope and hopelessness of what I am doing, by the impossible, unbearable contrast between the joyful invitation with which I fill each envelope and the random and fathomless thing rampaging through my skin, ever more frequent, ever more painful, that is lengthening, lengthening, lengthening the odds that this wedding will ever take place.

  I crumple over the table, my face pressed into my hands, and cry harder than I have ever cried, the spasms so intense that I twist from my chair and tumble to the floor, shrieking and writhing among the envelopes, streaking them with tears. It is as if I am being torn in two down my centre line; I have never experienced such an intense bifurcation of soul.

  Crying brings its
own relief. Some sort of chemical is released, I have heard, that normalises the mood, even as the situation itself remains unchanged; a wise self-limiting mechanism, for which, doubtless, we have evolution to thank.

  I push myself to a sitting position and shove my messy hair out of my face. I look at the piles on the table, and estimate that my task is about half-complete. If I finish it, and get rid of it, I won’t have to think about it again.

  Wearily I climb back into my seat. “Don’t feel,” I instruct myself. What is this, after all, but stuffing envelopes, a routine administrative task? In my mind’s eye, I take a splinter of ice, and I plunge it into my heart.

  A FEW DAYS later, I am in the north-facing spare room, sprawled on the bed barefoot, reading, when finally the sun itself has mercy on me. It is setting where it only does in summer, to the north-west of the house. Slowly it moves down the sky, slipping quietly into position, lining itself up with my window, carefully preparing its strike.

  The rays shoot into the room with the power and intensity of a laser, and I feel my feet ignite. Seconds later, in my mind, comes hideous illumination, a parody of St. Paul’s blinding light. Here, at last, is the truth, stark and unarguable, with no space left for doubt. I have my cause and my effect; other possibilities burn away, like flesh on a heretic’s bones.

  For a while I lie without moving, held under the claw of the sun. The room is bathed in peachy golden light, the bedclothes and the bookshelves strangely beautiful. I make no attempt to shield myself; I need to feel the burning of my feet, to keep on feeling it, to understand in every part of me that this is real, to know the world will not unwind itself and take a different, more convenient path.

  I hear footsteps mount the stairs. “Pete,” I call out, my voice cracking in my throat.