Woman Who Thought too Much, The

by Limburg, Joanne

  So I took a cab to the station and forgot my coat, which my uncle had to send on in a parcel. My father went to the doctor who diagnosed a transient ischaemic attack, a kind of mini stroke. Just another reminder to be careful, to stay on the exercise bike and off the cigarettes we sometimes found in his coat pockets.

  Mr Zen had lent me a book called Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life by Natalie Goldberg. Goldberg is a Zen Buddhist and creative writing guru. The fundamental principles she teaches are not dissimilar to those you might read in The Artist’s Way, or any number of other books in the creative writing section of your local bookshop, but that’s because they are good principles: write every day, and when you do your ‘writing practice’, keep your hand moving and don’t judge or edit your writing as it comes out. Just keep your hand moving. ‘Give yourself permission,’ she says, ‘to write badly.’ What you see published is just the polished tip of the iceberg: to find your way to a good piece of work, you have to write an awful lot of rubbish first. Thirteen years down the line, I can confirm the truth of this: it can take me as many as twelve or thirteen drafts to get a poem right, and you can barely imagine the great slag heap that’s building up on the right-hand side of this manuscript.

  By ‘keeping your hand moving’, or ‘freewriting’ or ‘hot-penning’ or whatever other term you use for the practice, and writing as if no one will ever read it, you are able to come out with your real feelings, real thoughts – to encounter the real nature of your mind, much as Marion Milner did in her experiments. ‘We need to accept our minds,’ says Goldberg. ‘Believe me, for writing, it is all we have.’24 What that mind is stocked with, Goldberg and Mr Zen liked to remind me, is first and foremost one’s own lived experience. Start with that, then see where you can take it. But in my case, Mr Z added, ‘What are you supposed to write about, when you don’t have a life?’ I took this very much to heart, as I took many things, and I was coming up to Scotland to find one.

  It was exhilarating, this getting-a-life business. I remember a song that was playing everywhere that summer, ‘Wake Up Boo’ by the Boo Radleys. One of the verses began: ‘Twenty-five/don’t recall a time I felt this alive.’

  I was twenty-five, and I was waking up.

  And what is it that wakes Sleeping Beauty? In the earlier versions of the tale, it’s more than a kiss. To help procure me a life, Mr and Mrs Zen introduced me to their circle of antibourgeois friends. Among them was another married pair, who adopted me in their turn. She would spend the afternoons with me, showing me the best cafes and taking me shopping for bohemian clothing, and he would sit up with me late into the night, talking and listening, and drinking herbal tea. I felt relaxed with him, and opened up: after all, he was married to a friend of mine, which had to be a guarantee of safety. Then one night, after I’d been lamenting my lack of a sexual history, and enumerating all the physical faults I believed were to blame, he came up, as it were, on my blind side, and kissed me. After I had swapped the Zens’ spare room for a room in a cheap-but-grubby student flat in Newington, we took it further. I was thoroughly ashamed of my stale virginity and here was a volunteer to help rid me of the stigma. We had sex three or four times. On one occasion, we began to have it unprotected, but quickly thought better of it. That’s as much as I’m telling you, and if it hadn’t been necessary to the story, I wouldn’t have told you anything. I’ve never understood how people with any relatives still living can bring themselves to write about their sex lives.

  Joan Rivers has a definition of a Jewish porn movie: ‘Ten minutes – the sex; two hours – the guilt!’ My physical relationship with the married man amounted to no more than a handful of encounters, but for a couple of months he was a constant presence in my head, and the notebooks I’ve kept from that time are full of him. I wrote a couple of poems about my obsession, which, for all our sakes, I won’t reproduce here. Any more-than-friendly feelings I might have had for him petered out after those few months, but the guilt is with me right now, thrashing about in the pit of my stomach. What bothered me then, and bothers me still, is not the sex as such, but rather that I had committed an act about which I could never be, at all times and to all people, thoroughly, scrupulously and immaculately honest. Particularly not to his wife, whose friend I claimed to be. That summer, I dreamed about her coming after me with an axe, the latest incarnation of my pitiless superego. But as time went on, I began to feel less afraid about what she might do to me and more sorry about what I’d done to her. My dreams changed accordingly. A couple of years down the line, I wrote this:

  Study in Watercolour

  Since I became the Other Woman,

  my dreams have been as slippery as conscience,

  scenes that shift in watercolour

  form, unform and run together.

  I’m a charcoal mark, ingrained,

  the one fixed point in a landscape

  that pours like rain through a gutter.

  I expect a storm and one appears:

  a black cumulus in the shape of a wife.

  I brace myself

  for a fist like a thunderclap,

  but as she grows towards me,

  I can see that she is crying

  and the tears are washing her face away,

  taking the dream with it.

  I wake to a voice softer than water:

  How could you do this to me?

  How could you do it . . .?

  A few weeks after I’d had my virginity removed, I met another writer, a Scottish country lad made good in the urban literary world, a latter-day Ettrick Shepherd. His writing was wonderful, he talked wonderfully about it, he was successful and personable, he was unmarried – he seemed perfect. Egged on by Mr Zen, I phoned him and arranged to meet up. Four vodkas, two enchiladas and a chaste cab ride later, I knew that he was perfect, and that I had to be madly in love. He phoned me at work the next morning, to ask after my head. We met up again, in a pub. He said he had a few things to sort out, a few girls, and then perhaps . . . Oh, but he was worth waiting for, and how sweet of him to put so much thought into how he was going to let the others down. I kept taking his phone calls and meeting him in pubs. So did Molly, a new single friend from the Zen circle. And various other women I didn’t know.

  There was always going to be some reason why he couldn’t go out with me properly, why he couldn’t do any more than phone me, meet me in pubs and drop me home at closing time; the reason, in the end, was that I had gone and lost my virginity, and so very recently, to someone else – a married someone, a married someone who lived in that very town. As I did not think it proper to keep any secrets from any man who might be the love of my life, I told him absolutely everything. He was appalled: how could I have had unprotected sex with that man? Didn’t I realize that he’d once been a heroin user? Didn’t I know how things were in Edinburgh? Now here I was, for all we knew, sitting on a pub bench with a ton of HIV-INFECTED PORRIDGE running through my veins.

  The first popular book on OCD, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing, was published in the States in the late eighties. The author is Judith L. Rapoport, an experienced psychiatrist with a special interest in the illness. She gives AIDS its own chapter. It is, she says, ‘an illness made to order for OC victims’.25 An invisible but deadly contaminant, the HIV virus gives ‘washers’ the perfect reason to keep washing. Even if you’re not one to wash, it is still a horribly plausible means by which you might inadvertently harm those closest to you. It is something you could pick up without realizing it and without meaning to. If you are concerned enough, you could go and get yourself tested, but you would need to be tested again three months later to be absolutely sure, and even then, no test is 100 per cent reliable, and even if it were, how could you be sure that, somewhere along the line, some administrator or technician hadn’t mixed everyone’s results up? And on top of all that, ‘AIDS is a judgment, suggesting sexual transgression, and illegal and immoral acts. It causes hideous shame and discrimination. It is so terrifying, s
o irrational that it could have been the creation of an obsessive-compulsive’s worst fantasy’ [ibid, p. 164]. And don’t bother to point out how much treatments for HIV have improved since Rapoport wrote those lines – you know that’s not the point.

  *

  One of the employment agencies I’d visited had found me a fourmonth posting at the Scottish and Northern Irish branch of a broadcasting monitoring company, working in sales and customer services. It only paid about £9,500 a year, but I got to call myself a ‘Sales Executive’, which at least looked better on my CV than ‘Clerical Assistant’. My job was to sell tapes and transcripts of radio and TV news items to interested organizations, as soon as possible after they had been broadcast, and before any of the company’s competitors could get there first. My hours were from 7.45 in the morning to 4.15 in the afternoon. I would get up at 6.30 every morning and hope that the walk across town would wake me up sufficiently to avoid disgracing myself. After my work finished, I would go home and write, or try to. Then I would have to go to bed several hours earlier than any of my student flatmates, and get up at intervals to ask them to turn their stereos down.

  My Scottish spring had turned into a hot, uncomfortable summer, with a turgid, sticky heat at least as bad as anything I’d trudged through in London. Sweating at my office desk one day, I found I had an itchy middle, which I couldn’t stop scratching. When I went to the bathroom to inspect the area, I found a large, pinkish plaque in the crease of my waist. It didn’t look like heat rash, or hives. Maybe it was an insect bite, but what kind of monstrous fly could inflict something that size? I was none the wiser, and kept scratching. The next day I had a chain of them, all the way round, so I had to keep twisting in my office chair in order to scratch properly.

  That evening, in my stew of a rented room, I put the phone down after a long conversation with Molly, and scratched some more: on my stomach, round my collarbone, then under my bra, then my waist again, then my arm . . . I pulled my T-shirt up and started: I looked as if I had been rolling naked in a nettle patch. I spent the hot night, pyjama-less and duvet-less, desperately seeking a cool and dry patch on the sheet. Next day, the rash had spread down my thighs and up my neck. I went to see my latest doctor, and she asked to see my back.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a Christmas tree there.’ Then she pulled a big textbook off a shelf and showed me a picture of someone else with a similar tree on their back. It was a rash which followed the pattern of the nerves, she explained. I had pityriasis rosea, a pretty common skin infection. Students often got it from living in dirty flats and not washing their clothes properly. It would clear up by itself after a while. In the meantime, there was always calamine lotion.

  It took weeks to fade. During the day, I wore loose dresses, sweated and scratched. At night, I painted myself calamine-pink all over – this cooled all my tiny fires for a few minutes at least – and lay naked on the bed, stretched out in all directions like a cross on the Saltire. When it faded, my skin was softer than it had been for a long time – I hadn’t felt like picking.

  A couple of days after I saw the doctor, I met Molly for tea in the Elephant House on George IV Bridge, and told her all about my skin. She was fascinated: ‘That’s so weird! I wonder why your immune system just went like that?’

  My IMMUNE SYSTEM! The INFECTED PORRIDGE. It had to be my punishment, it had to be a CONVERSION TRAUMA.

  Jane was now a junior doctor. I phoned her in a panic and she told me that I would have to be the unluckiest woman in the world if this were the case. ‘And anyway, if I were an HIV virus, I’d choose something a bit more esoteric than that.’

  I wasn’t reassured. It was the words IMMUNE and INFECTED that kept repeating on me: as I walked to work, as I tried to write, as I tried to sleep, as I showered in the flat’s disgustingly filthy bathroom.

  ‘Pityriasis rosea?’ asked one of my flatmates. ‘Oh, I had that!’

  At the end of the summer, the manager came back from her maternity leave, the sales executive who’d been covering for her went back to his old job, and I negotiated a permanent part-time contract with the company. It suited me, because I had more time to write, and it suited them, because I was cheap, and, in an early-morning business, doing barely less work for them than I had been doing full time. In the autumn, I moved to a cheaper room in another filthy flat, nearer to work and only incidentally nearer to the flat where the Ettrick Shepherd laid his crook. Had I been less insistent on being in love with him, I think I might have enjoyed his company a good deal more: he was very funny, very knowledgeable, full of wonderful stories, enthusiastic about my poetry and a source of invaluable writing advice. At his suggestion, I began to keep a written record of my submissions to poetry magazines. I still have that notebook – a tatty green exercise book with ‘SUBMISSIONS’ written on the front – and there are still a few blank pages left at the back. Turning to the front, the first five entries are crossed through entirely, but on the fourth page I’ve listed a submission to an Edinburgh-based journal called Ibid. I had sent three poems to the editors at the end of September, and one of them, an eightline poem entitled ‘Hummers’, which I had written at the City workshop, has a tick next to it. My first publication.

  So I kept writing, kept attending workshops in the Scottish Poetry Library, and kept sending poems out. I became good friends with Catherine, another young poet I met at the library workshops. We met at least once a week to share our poems, helping each other to decide which ones were good enough to send out, cheering each other on when our work was accepted, and commiserating when our poems came back rejected. I got my second acceptance the following January, by which time I had moved again, this time to a tiny back room in a flat which had a magnificent view of Holyrood Park from its living-room window, and a contrasting view over the Edinburgh–London rail route at the back. The Holyrood view was one of the perks of the place; besides that, it was just round the corner from Catherine, and I had the whole flat to myself on weekdays. The owner made a weekly commute to Aberdeen, and spent his weekends in Edinburgh. He was a friendly man, who introduced me to his social circle, liked having company in his flat at weekends, and liked to talk: he would start telling me all about his journey back from Aberdeen as soon as he came in through the door on a Friday night, told me about his plans for Saturday night over breakfast on Saturday morning, and filled me in about how the night had gone over breakfast on Sunday. Once, as an experiment, I sat holding a broadsheet newspaper spread out full in front of my face, to see if it would interrupt the flow of talk in my direction – it made no difference.

  That was the weekend. During the week, for the first time in my life, I lived alone. I watched what I wanted to watch on the TV, listened to my own music in any room in the flat, sat up late at the living-room table writing and left my work spread out ready for the next afternoon. Sometimes Catherine came to the flat. More often I went out to meet her, or Molly, or one of my old flatmates, or my newest friend, Maria, whom I’d met through the loquacious landlord. More often than not, I was by myself, and at night, invariably so.

  The married man was long gone and the Ettrick Shepherd was spending the winter abroad. Mr and Mrs Zen had left town too. I’d had a boyfriend – a proper, official one – very briefly after we had got together at the Zens’ leaving do, but the relationship – if you can call it that – had fizzled out after a couple of weeks. This was only partly because I had finally achieved a drunken fumble with the Shepherd, and then couldn’t refrain from a tearful confession to my new man. It was more that we soon realized we had little in common, disagreed about most things and, when it came to it, didn’t really like each other. We soon slid out of sync and out of temper, then we broke up, and before I knew it, my newly gained belief that it was physically possible for me to have sex was gone. Over the next year, I answered the odd personal ad – I even placed one – but nothing came of it. Summer was over. The only new people I was meeting were my landlord’s friends and – Maria aside
– we had little to say to each other. I stopped accepting his invitations to join him on his Saturday nights. Mostly I spent them in the flat with a bag of chips and a video. He shook his head at me: ‘If you’re not careful, life is going to pass you by.’

  Sometimes I did go out – sometimes Maria even managed to drag me into a nightclub, get a drink down me and persuade me to dance. These experiences only confirmed what I’d always suspected, which was that a night spent bumping into drunken, sweaty bodies in an overheated room while trying to hear yourself talk over deafening music just wasn’t fun for a person of my type. I could add it to my growing list of things which were not fun, which already included: drinking in basement bars until chucking-out time and getting filthy looks from the staff while you do it; sleeping with people you barely know; sharing a rancid student flat with a drug-dealer whose mates stink up the communal kitchen cooking full breakfasts at peculiar hours, or else propose to you while under the influence of strong hallucinogens; taking a call from an angry, drunken friend at midnight and spending the next half-hour persuading him that beating up a flatmate of yours who had once been a friend of his but had fallen out with him and now didn’t want him visiting the flat would be neither an honourable, necessary nor even an acceptable course; turning up for work hungover; reporting to a police incident room to look at photographs of the young woman whose body had been found shoved down a pipe in the building directly across the road from yours; lying to people; reading Irvine Welsh. I had fast-forwarded through my long-delayed adolescence and now I needed to hibernate for a while.