Woman Who Thought too Much, The

by Limburg, Joanne

  We found each other fairly quickly, and he suggested that we move on straight away to another, swankier bar, where we could sit at a quieter table and order a better sort of drink. As I sipped my whatever-it-was, he told me how he had just completed his MBA in London, and was now working for some type of management consultancy, which specialized in ‘rationalization’ – or was it ‘downsizing’? He boasted about the vast numbers of people he was going to help make redundant, and did a little sub-machine gun mime with a twelve-year-old schoolboy’s glee. He waved a platinum American Express card around when it was time to pay. Later, over dinner in an Indonesian restaurant, he told me that he’d been on about ten blind dates now, and on some of them – not this one, of course – he’d wished he had been blind, ha! ha! For all his platinum gallantry, I don’t think he was that taken with me either. We said our polite goodbyes at the station, and boarded our separate trains.

  It was about eleven o’clock when I arrived back at Canons Park tube station, and began without a second’s thought to walk home. I was about halfway there, when I heard the voice say: ‘This is a bit late for you, isn’t it?’

  I jumped and turned round. I recognized him, this man in the beige raincoat with his too-bright smile. I had often passed him on this street in the daytime, and as he had always said hello to me as if he knew me, I had always thought that perhaps he did know me and, not wanting to be rude, had got into the habit of saying hello back. Now that he was blocking my way at eleven o’clock at night, I realized that I had never known him, except as the Strange-Looking Man Who Always Says Hello.

  He said again that this was late for me to be out; he thought I must be on my way home, as I lived – and he pointed in the right direction – up there, didn’t I? Yes, he thought so. And round the corner there, that was the street where he lived. He’d been meaning to talk to me for ages – he’d seen me around and wondered, who was that beautiful girl? He’d never seen me so late before, but as it happened he was often walking about at this sort of time – you know how it is, you get bored at home alone in the evenings, you spend too much time and money in Internet chat rooms, or you just go and walk about for a bit, save on the phone bill . . . So, anyway, what about me? How come I was out so late?

  After a few minutes, I said I’d see him around and went home.

  I stopped walking down that particular street after dark, but he’d introduced himself now, so he felt bold enough to strike up a few one-sided conversations in daylight. A couple of days later, he stepped out in front of me in the same place, and gave me some pens from his work as a gift – he knew he should give me flowers really, but take the pens. No, he meant it, don’t be silly, take the pens.

  I stopped walking down that street at all. I took the bus. He sat down next to me and asked me where I was going. I pretended that I was off to see my boyfriend. Then I opened my book and read it. He marched to the front of the bus and shouted at the bus driver. He didn’t bother me again, but then I made damn sure he wouldn’t, by avoiding all the places where I’d encountered him.

  MAN – ENCROACHING – AAAGH!

  Dependence

  11. When doubts and worries come to my mind, I cannot rest until I have talked them over with a reassuring person.

  The Padua Inventory

  ———

  I scare myself just thinking about you

  I scare myself when I’m without you

  I scare myself the moment that you’re gone

  I scare myself when I let my thoughts run

  Dan Hicks

  A few weeks back, my husband asked me how far I’d got with the book. I told him I hadn’t quite got to the part where we meet, but it was coming up shortly.

  ‘I presume I’m the light at the end of the tunnel?’ he asked.

  Up to that point, the history of my relationships with men had been exactly what you might predict for a neurotic, obsessive, rather self-absorbed, dermotillomanic young she-poet: slight, shallow and unsatisfactory. I met Chris in the late autumn of 1998, when I had just begun work on my PhD. I had decided to drop my NAS job by then, and was beginning to think about looking for a flat near my latest university; property prices were cheaper there, so I would be able buy a small place, find a part-time job to help pay a small mortgage, and share my shrunken life with my ever-growing book collection. If I was going to be on my own for ever because the only men who found me attractive were quietly desperate characters in tan macs who forced pens into my hands, well, then so be it. I was beginning to be aware that I was giving off some whiff of desperation myself – various men I had met at the university had thrown their girlfriends or partners into the conversation with a certain pointed casualness, and I read this as a very bad sign.

  So I worked hard. The task for my first PhD year was to take in as much as I could of the voluminous psychoanalytic literature on creativity, review it and then refine my research question in terms of whatever I’d managed to make of what I’d just spent the year reviewing. A literature review breaks down, roughly, into three stages: 1) Gather the material, read it, scribble all over it (if owned or photocopied) and take far too many notes. 2) Sit down at your desk, make a few notes on the notes, panic, eat, cry, pick your skin, pace the room, go for some real walks, avoid your desk until you lose patience with yourself. 3) Finally write a summary of what you’ve read, comparing the different schools and authors and offering the odd thought of your own if you happen to be feeling clever that day.

  I began by returning to my favourite, Milner, then went back to Freud, revisited Klein and Winnicott from my MA, then moved on to Anna Freud, her followers, the Annafreudians, then Klein’s followers, the Kleinians, the followers of Klein’s followers, the neo-Kleinians, and so on until I came to something like a contemporary position.

  It was very interesting to see how much of what was written – though by no means all of it – tallied with what I’d learned from my own experience, as a student and as a poet. To accomplish any creative task, the analysts said, the individual needed to be able to tolerate a certain amount of internal discomfort: anxiety, doubt, uncertainty, conflict, confusion – in a word, mess. This is harder to manage if that individual is faced with difficult internal conditions, such as, for example, the presence of a superego with a loud and carrying voice who keeps asking you how far you’ve got, belittling whatever you’ve managed to do, and telling you to tidy up all the time. In Kleinian terms, such a figure is a ‘persecutory internal object’, an unintegrated, impacted part of the self powered up with nasty feelings and dead set on its mission of thwarting other, healthier parts of the self that are trying to get on with their work. It represents one kind of creative block. Here’s an extract from a paper about an artist who was suffering from one:

  When the analysis proceeded to deeper levels it became clear that her depressions were related to a system of phantasies in which she felt herself possessed and inhabited by devils. These devils – at the beginning of the analysis they were innumerable – persecuted her constantly and in ever-varying ways. They roamed about inside her, caused her physical pain and illnesses, inhibited her in all her activities, especially in painting, and compelled her to do things she did not want to do. When she wanted to get up in the morning they moved about violently in her stomach and made her vomit. When she wanted to paint they interfered. They would roar with laughter when she tried to achieve something. They would force her to go to the lavatory constantly, and during a certain period she had to urinate so frequently that it disturbed her work seriously. They had forks with which they prodded and attacked her in the most cruel ways. They would eat her up from inside and force her to take food for them. But she felt she could not eat because they would poison her with their excrement and thus turn food into poison. Owing to these persecutions she was in agony, especially when painting.28

  I knew exactly what she meant: anxiety can be hell on the digestion, and it makes you wee a lot too.

  Early that summer, at the Society of Au
thors awards ceremony, I had made friends with one of the other Eric Gregory recipients, a computer science student who lived with her fiancé in Cambridge. In November, we travelled to the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival together, and in December she invited me round for dinner. Although I had said many times, and meant it, that I would never go back to That Town, I accepted the invitation: I wanted to see more of my new poetry friend, and there would be single men there, but no pressure. Chris was sitting opposite me, but the only thing I remember him saying to me over dinner was: ‘That’s the best Cartman impersonation I’ve ever heard.’ I wasn’t aware that he was particularly taken with anything else about me, so it was quite a surprise when he sent an email to my mother’s address the following January, and asked me out.

  We met at Belsize Park station, realized that neither of us really wanted to see Life is Beautiful, and went to a restaurant in Hampstead. I already knew a little about him: he worked at the Computer Laboratory, and he liked to paint in oils; he knew that I was a poet, who could do good Cartman impressions. During a long evening in the Hampstead restaurant, we learned more. Chris liked photography as well as painting; while painting, he preferred to listen to Underworld, or Orbital, although he still carried a torch for the Cocteau Twins. He didn’t share my desire to live by the sea, because he had grown up on the Solent, near Portsmouth, and to him the seaside meant floating detritus, drunken sailors, noisy shipping, and boys sitting in sullen rows on the harbour wall smoking during lunchtime. But he did like cats, and had two of his own. He had two siblings as well, but they were much older, and living in New Zealand.

  Next weekend we met at the Tate for lunch, looked round an exhibition of Francis Bacon sketches together, and carried on talking. Chris, like me, had lost his father. Like my father, his had smoked, but in his case it had been narrative irony that had killed him, as he had died in a car accident on his way to get the all-clear from his oncologist. It had been a different kind of bereavement in other ways, too: Chris’s father had moved to New Zealand some years before to join his older children, and it had been impossible for Chris to get to the funeral. In any case, he had not lived with his father since he was six years old, when his parents had divorced. His father had remained behind on the RAF base in Malta where he worked, while Chris and his mother had moved home, to England, to the south coast. The years that followed had not been easy for either of them: his mother had suffered frequent bouts of ill health, and had spent some time in hospital. When Chris had not been in foster care, he had been the man of the house. Sometimes it would seem to me that, while I had taken for ever to grow up, Chris had been grown up for ever.

  The following weekend, I went to visit him at his house in Cambridge. I learned that his paintings were wonderful and his cats were very endearing; he had fully stocked bookshelves and he knew how to cook. I stayed the night. The next weekend he came to stay with me. We carried on alternating weekends, and on the weekdays, we emailed. I introduced Chris to my family; we met each other’s friends.

  How could it possibly be going so well? For the first few weeks I was deeply sceptical, but I really couldn’t find what the catch might be, so, with the help of my analyst, I gave up trying. Tunnel, light . . . OK, yes.

  Meeting Chris was a watershed in my life, but I couldn’t find too much about it in my notebooks: then, as now, I used them mostly to record the kinds of feelings – fears, embarrassments, misgivings, griefs, vague sensations of dread – that I could most reliably turn into poems. Success and happiness just don’t do it for me or my muse: we both suspect that those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first allow to be happy, because then the happiness adds a certain extra piquancy to the destruction part, and that makes the whole thing so much more fun.

  So I can’t find too many references to the other momentous good thing which happened to me that spring, which was that Bloodaxe Books accepted my first poetry collection. I had sent fifty poems to them in March, bound together under the title Sisyphus’ Daughter, and in May I received a fat envelope in the post, with a catalogue, a couple of contracts to sign, and a letter offering publication on condition that I agreed to certain changes, including, for a start, a different title. On 19 May, I was trying a few out in my notebook:

  The Gulping Hourglass

  The Frequent Flyer’s Book of the Dead

  Scaling the North Face of Hopkins

  The War on all Dolls

  The Accident Book

  Left Luggage

  Not Yet Human

  Death of an Accountant

  Plastic Sunlight

  A Book of Accidents

  A Feminine Itch

  Seven Shades of Guilt

  Leave God Out of It

  In the end, I settled for Femenismo, one of the poem titles the editor had suggested and which I liked well enough to use. The book was scheduled to come out in early autumn 2000. In the meantime, I took out the weaker poems, added a few newer, stronger ones, and worried myself sick about how my work might be received. My worries became my own devils, and they would possess me every time I tried to write. I didn’t understand then that, certainly in my case, creativity comes in cycles; I didn’t realize that I was simply entering a natural fallow period, so I panicked, and kept on pushing myself. My work became stiffer and more stilted as the year progressed, then slowed almost to a standstill. By the time November came around, all I could manage was:

  Laundry

  So my life has come to this:

  all I ever make is laundry.

  Awake or asleep, I’m always

  shuffling round some shopping mall,

  raking through knitwear carousels

  that whirl into infinity,

  searching, with the fever of teething gums,

  for the ultimate cardigan.

  Is it any wonder the wardrobe’s bursting,

  the linen basket overflowing

  like an archive of disproved hypotheses?

  The grey bras, the shrinking T-shirts,

  that embarrassed puddle of lycra,

  my favourite dress – now ruined dress –

  my lost, remembered, perfect dress:

  all laundry, in the end. More laundry.

  Strictly speaking, it was Chris’s laundry basket. I had moved in by then.

  We made the decision in the summer; I was to move in sometime in the autumn, after Chris had returned from a long-planned trip to see family in New Zealand. He was away for three weeks. At the same time, my mother was in the States, visiting my brother. I was alone in the house. I wasn’t used to being alone any more, and I soon realized that at some point, or maybe gradually, I’d shed the me-alone carapace I’d grown around myself when I lived in Edinburgh. I wrote that I was becoming ‘uneasy about knives’, that I was having ‘train anxiety dreams’, that I was finding it harder and harder to cross the road when there was no one to cross it with me.

  One particular little non-incident left me with an instant and very uncomfortable spike. I’ve sometimes thought of it as that moment when my adult OCD fully revealed itself – or would have done, if I’d been able to recognize it as such. At the time, I described it in my notebook as being ‘one of those could’ve-happened-but-didn’t shock/panic experiences’. I was standing at a pelican crossing on Station Road in Stanmore, waiting to cross the road. The green light turned red, the green man started bleeping. As I prepared to take my first step into the road, I turned my head to the right, as I always did and always will, to check that the oncoming traffic had done the proper thing and stopped, and . . . a van, a white van with a wire cage full of evergreen shrubs trailing behind it, sailed through the red light and all the way across the crossing. That was all that happened.

  But, I wrote in my notebook, ‘what if I had had a moment of absent-mindedness and just stepped across when I saw the green man? That would have been the end of me. What if I’d been in hospital, unable to speak – and both Mum & Chris out of the country?’

  VAN – CROSSING – SQUELCH!


  When I was alone, I ruminated about the crossing, about the van, about vans and crossings in general, about the kind of injuries one might sustain if thrown into the air by a van at a crossing, about the chances of surviving these injuries, but, strangely, this activity only seemed to make me more anxious. If my mother or Chris were available, I could ask for reassurance, about that crossing or the risks of road-crossing, or anything else that was making me anxious at any given moment, and just as long as they gave it, the anxiety would stay away for as long as I was talking to them. If either of them was with me when I had to cross a road, I would take the nearest available arm, usually without thinking about it. Inevitably, as Chris and I grew closer, and after I moved in with him, he emerged as the new chief guarantor of my safety. And the safer I came to feel with Chris, the less safe I would come to feel in his absence.

  We expect grown men and women to take responsibility for their own safety and well-being: it’s probably the minimum requirement for adulthood. It is ridiculous for a woman of twenty-nine to feel unable to cross a main road by herself, or take a plane by herself, or walk round the track side of a group of people on a Tube platform, or ride a bicycle on the road in a town where half the population does just that every day, but I did feel unable to do any of these things, and I would struggle to do most of them now. I still have to force myself to take out-of-town journeys, as I can never quite be certain that I’m going to return home alive. It would probably help if I could manage to stop visualizing the gap between my starting point and my destination as a wide and depthless black abyss, but old habits die hard. Every time I think of a journey I’m going to have to make, up it flashes, the thought: ABYSS. I can’t see my way to the other side, I can’t see the bottom, and there’s no way of crossing except for one tatty rope bridge; it has a guide rope on one side only, and half the slats are missing.