‘Beat you to it,’ she says.
‘Leave the water in when you’re finished.’ As he walks back downstairs he recalls that that was what he used to say to Frejya. He recalls too how much he used to enjoy the thought that it was her water he would be slipping into.
He realizes now that his memories of Frejya have not receded with time, but somehow grown more vivid. He surprises himself by also realizing that he feels closer to his wife now than at any time since they parted. It is as if, through Hannah, she is coming back to life. He is falling in love again, with a ghost.
A few minutes later, Edward is carrying empty wine bottles to the recycling bin in the kitchen. Finding Hannah’s iPad, he looks at the BBC news website. There is still no sign of an end to the Norwegian volcano’s eruption. A photograph shows a mushroom cloud of ash. The Romantic poets would have approved, he thinks. Man humbled by the violence of nature.
He clicks on a report about the President of the United States announcing a phased withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. The tide of war is ebbing, the President says, and it is time to focus on nation-building. Edward finds himself wondering once more why he was released. Niall’s explanation seems too neat. Too easy. He reads on. ‘Taliban rules out UN talks.’ A statement from them declares that they believe they have the ‘upper hand’ and are certain that they are ‘winning’.
‘Anything interesting?’ Hannah asks as she saunters barefoot down the stairs wearing her mother’s dressing gown and towelling her hair.
‘The Taliban are winning in Afghanistan, apparently. Did you leave the water in?’
‘All yours.’
With a shiver, Edward realizes that this is what Frejya used to say when she vacated the bath. All yours.
Hannah slumps into a chair by the fireplace, puffs out her cheeks, exhales loudly. She can feel the tiny pinpoints of sweat on the sides of her nose and on her upper lip. Wiping them away with a finger and thumb she sits up again, reaches forward to the coffee table in front of her and picks up a German interiors magazine from a pile. She flicks through it distractedly before using it to fan herself. After a few seconds she tosses it on to the cushion beside her and sighs again, a throatier noise. Remembering an electric fan she has seen in the kitchen, she fetches it and plugs it in, directing it at the sofa. She feels restless. There is a sensation like butterflies in her belly, yet she doesn’t feel nervous. It is more … excitement. Sensitivity.
She picks up her lighter and, as she taps it on the armrest, her eyes flit around the room before fixing on the ornate clock on the chimneypiece. How long has it been stopped? She rises to her feet. Behind it she finds a key, but it is obviously not the one for winding the clock.
She walks from room to room, trying to locate Walser’s office. Unable to find it she returns to the drawing room and looks under cabinets and behind paintings and tapestries, unsure what for. A wall safe perhaps. By pressing with her foot she tests the floorboards. Taps oak panels to see if they are hollow. Nothing.
Her mobile pings and she returns to the sofa. A text from Martin Cullen. She smiles as she types a reply: ‘Nothing to report so far. Over and out x’. When she puts the phone back on the table she sees the magazine she had been flicking through earlier was covering a notebook. She opens it. Written in a sloping hand so neat it looks like calligraphy are lines from a poem.
‘ “Of peace and pity fell like dew / On flowers half dead – thy lips did meet / Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw / Their soft persuasion on my brain.” – Shelley’
She wonders if this is her father’s handwriting. It seems so elegant and Victorian. How strange, she thinks, that she doesn’t even know what her own father’s handwriting looks like. She turns the page and finds more writing, prose this time. Realizing this is his memoir, she looks towards the stairs and listens. Satisfied that he is still in the bath, she begins to read.
Sometimes a song would enter my head and not leave. ‘What’s The Story Morning Glory?’ was one. It would grown grow louder and louder. As I lurched around the cave like a drunk, shouting at the dark and jumping at imagined shapes, I tried to rid myself of the song, and then it would disappear to be replaced with a nothingness so dense it left me questioning whether I could get through the next five minutes, whether there would be enough left in my head.
Hannah feels a chill pass up her nape to the base of her skull. She looks at the stairs again, not wanting to disturb the air by breathing. Her eyes fall on the page again, hungrily now.
I would have vivid fever dreams about Frejya that would leave me confused about the difference between being asleep and awake. They were not erotic in content – I had long since been rendered impotent, even in my dreams – but sometimes, when I woke from them, I would recall how she used to touch my shoulder in the night. Even there in that cave I would sometimes wake to the sound of her voice saying:‘You were dreaming, Ed.’
I craved conversation. The monotonous repetition of my own thinking thoughts exhausted me. But the darkness offered no stimulation, nothing to feed my imagination. I no longer worried that the world outside the cave might have forgotten me, because I had forgotten was forgetting myself. I could spend hours trying to remember details about my life: my age, my phone number, even my own name.
As the solitary confinement ate into me I would talk to myself and fixate on the things I missed. A chair. If only I had a chair to sit on I could feel like a man again. A candle and a box of matches. A book. If only I had a book.
Concentrating on one thing at a time sometimes helped me push away the emptiness and silence of the cave. But half-remembered lines of poetry left me frustrated and I couldn’t often I couldn’t work out whether some poem circulating in my head was one I had made up or one I had learned. I would fantasize about having a pen and paper to write it down.
At one point I attempted a hunger strike, but the stomach cries out to be fed and this, I sometimes thought, was what I had been reduced to: a stomach without a brain. An empty stomach and an open mouth. (MORE ON THIS??? TOO UPSETTING FOR H TO READ???)
When weakened by lack of food I sometimes hallucinated and imagined that I was sharing the cave with … something, a presence. Not malign necessarily. Sometimes I can hear it purring throatily, like
At other times, when I thought I might have managed a new idea, I would find myself turning to tell someone, only to be reminded of my solitude. My memory was growing slack, my emotions loose. I realized familiar faces were turning blank. I could no longer remember properly what Hannah looked like, not properly. I could see her hair but not the details of her face. Even Frejya was becoming a ghost.
Slowly closing the notebook, as if fearing to disturb the words any more than she already has, Hannah shakes her head. Having often tried to imagine how her father had coped in that cave, without light, without conversation, without love, she now realizes that he barely had. She is about to place the notebook back under the magazine when she hesitates. Listens. Her father is still in the bath. She opens it again.
The daily arrival of food created a brief pool of fuzzy light in which I was able to mark off the weeks on the ground, six vertical lines crossed with one diagonal, scratched into the ground stone. After a few months of doing that I ran out of space, but it didn’t matter because I had other ways of measuring time, such as the length of my nails and my beard. It was so long it reached below my ribs.
Night-time was detectable by a slight drop in temperature. The mornings, meanwhile, I could sometimes work out from the sound of a cockerel crowing, or a muffled call to prayers somewhere in the distance. Allahu Akbar. This was usually followed by the bubble of a kettle ‘upstairs’, walkie-talkies being tested, blankets being rolled up and, finally, a campfire being stamped out.
I could even work out the seasons. In the summer the dripping water stopped. In the winter it froze. One year winter I worked out how I might get some warm clothes. There was a guard nicknamed I had nicknamed Brains, because he had a dull, bovine look
about him. As well as being a moron stupid, Brains was also sadistic. He liked to spit on me and sometimes he would amuse himself by pulling the trigger on an empty gun, laughing to himself when it clicked. It was Brains I had decided to trick.
Knowing that Muslims were offended by nudity, I removed my tattered clothes and, when the boulder was rolled back and I saw Brains on guard duty, I stood directly in the light spilling through the hole. It had the desired effect. After cursing at me to put the my clothes back on, and making a show of clicking fresh bullets into the magazines of his AK-47, Brains threw down a shalwar kaneez (sp??), a sheepskin jerkin and a pakul (sp?) for my head. A small victory. As I put them on, I found myself laughing for the first time since my arrival in Afghanistan.
(MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE GUARDS HERE???)
While thinking of Frejya gave me strength, thinking of Hannah weakened me, making me slip into self-pity and sentimentality – emotions I knew were dangerous in that place. I pitied myself for not being there to look after my little girl. I would think of her performing in school plays without me being there to watch; how she would be playing in hockey matches; singing in the choir; growing up …
I longed to read her one more bedtime story before she left her childhood behind. What did she use to call them? ‘Bednight stories’. By the time I had left, she had been able to read books for herself, but she liked me to do it. What were her favourites? Little Babaji … The Tiger Who Came to Tea … The Twits. Afterwards I would kiss her goodnight, on her brow. I missed her so much …
Hannah stops reading to blot a tear that has fallen on to the page. It has made the ink run and she blows on the paper to dry it. She sniffs and dabs at her eyes with the sleeve of her dressing gown before closing the notebook and hugging it to her chest. Realizing she hasn’t heard her father in the bath for a while, she wonders if he is OK. Then she hears the sound of a tap running for a few seconds and opens the notebook again.
Sometimes when I woke to find the darkness hissing about my ears, I would wonder whether I had been talking to myself again, whether that was what had woken me. I would widen my eyes, searching for something to focus on. But there was nothing. The the blackness was complete. There was almost a purity to it.
The sound of my voice would seem muffled. At other times I would force myself not to speak, feeling that I must not disturb the darkness with my words because I would awaken it, and I would rather it was asleep.
Feeling concussed, I would close my eyes once more and points of light would blotch behind my eyelids. I could no longer be sure when I was hearing my voice in my head or when the words were being spoken out loud. Questions were coming from somewhere. ‘How does Frejya know I am alive?’ ‘How do I know I am here?’ I would pinch my skin or tug at my beard and say out loud: ‘If I can hurt myself, does that mean I am alive? That I exist?’
I would sometimes think of Sartre’s idea that
As a coping strategy I began thinking of myself in the third person, to stand outside my body. This was not happening to me, the inner man, but to Edward Northcote, the outer man. In this way I would allow myself my self-awareness to be swallowed up in the black incubus around me. I meant the white, for that was another coping strategy: the darkness was, in fact, lightness. I was merely living in a negative world where white was black. In this parallel world, the tarry blackness was not palpable. You could not touch it with your fingers like something liquid, something heavier than air, something that seeps into your blood like ice water. In this world the blackness was my friend, not my enemy.
Sometimes when the food basket was lowered and pulled back up again, I would resist the urge to plead with my guards not to roll the boulder back into place. It did no good anyway and they seemed to enjoy my fear. On these occasions, as the last blur of light disappeared, I would think of it as the light being dimmed before a performance at the theatre. This was good, I told myself. I could be alone with
Sometimes the guards couldn’t be bothered to lower my food and just threw it down to me, like scraps to a dog. I found the potato peelings hardest to eat, but I ate them nonetheless.
Sometimes I would bend down to pick something up and stay in that position for hours, saliva dripping from my open mouth, as if I was catatonic.
The guards sometimes stood around the opening staring down at me, like gods looking down on the world, determining the fate of mortals. They seemed to change fairly regularly, presumably to prevent me building up a bond with them, but there were two who kept coming back: Brains and the boy, who was now a teenager with a line of dark, downy hair above his top lip.
The boy, who I had nicknamed Becks, was kinder than the others. He gave me a candle one day and I stared at my reflection in a spoon for the first time in years. It was distorted, but that was not the reason I did not recognize myself. My skin was waxy, almost translucent. There were black pools under my eyes. All animation had gone from them. My cheekbones were raised and I had a straggly beard. Every minute of my confinement seemed to be graven into my face. With my Afghan clothes and beard, I looked like one of them.
Another small mercy was that after a few years the guards no longer bothered to roll the boulder back over the hole. I would spend hours passively staring up at it, imagining myself at the bottom of a well looking up at the stars. I would contemplate spiders’ webs, awed by their delicacy, by the way they caught the silky light.
The boredom was like a physical pain, raw and scratchy. It was the enemy, along with time. I tried to kill it, but could not. No strategy worked. I felt weightless. Hollow. Unanchored, as if asleep. Asleep and awake at the same time. I longed to see the stars and feel the sun on my face. But I’d forgotten what the sky looked like, at night and during the day.
Most days I would wake to the lonely, soundless dark only to find, after my initial disorientation, that it was not silent, after all, that it was loud with the pulse of my blood, my breathing, the tiny clicks my eyes made as I blinked.
Feeling as if I was being drowned by the darkness, that it was inside me, pouring into my lungs, I would put my hands over my mouth and nose and ears. It didn’t work. It was soon seeping in behind my eyeballs. If my veins were cut, I became convinced, my blood would be black, as black as ink.
My days did not separate in any meaningful way. There was nothing to distinguish them, nothing with which to measure their silent, monotonous drag. My mind had nothing to hang on to, nothing upon which to concentrate. I could no longer find a direction for my thinking, or even recall my dreams in the first few seconds after waking up.
And I could no longer bear to think of Frejya’s warmth. For so long she had seemed the opposite of that cold, colourless place, but now my memories of her were too painful. In place of memory, a thick and heavy loneliness poured into me. It was as sluggish as wet concrete and it left me feeling as if I was being drowned from the insi
Often I was driven so deep into myself, the daily arrival of my food came as an unwelcome intrusion, one that frightened and unnerved me, making me scuttle backwards into the shadows. In moments of insanity I no longer even wanted to be rescued. The thought of being freed filled me with as much panic as the thought of being held hostage had once done.
(Mention here ???? how random cricket statistics kept passing through my head and driving me mad because I couldn’t work out what the numbers meant … Sir Donald Bradman – average of 99.94. Geoffrey Boycott – 8,114 runs. Top score 246 not out. All abstract, all out of context. I knew I used to love cricket but by then I couldn’t remember how the game worked.)
In the early days, my emotions had been closer to the surface. Now my feelings had been buried so deeply they no longer affected me. My my eyes had dried up. In this I had finally found a way to deal with the painful, crushing boredom. I had decided to go mad on my own terms; allow myself to sink into it. Light-headed from hunger, I sometimes felt as if every thought I had ever had was passing through my mind all at once. The cave was full of my thoughts, my memories, and my th
eories. They were all competing for space. I was drowning in my own thoughts; they were too heavy, too liquid, wave after crushing wave.
One day, in what might have been the morning, I thought I heard footsteps ‘upstairs’, first coming closer, then farther away, then coming back again. A guard I hadn’t seen before appeared. He was in his mid-twenties, at a guess, wearing glasses and a black waistcoat and he appeared to be he was holding a small video camera. He filmed me staring up at him and then said something gently in Urdu to someone hidden from view. A ladder was lowered. I stared at it in confusion. Then another guard appeared, this one with a gun, and he shone a torch in my face as the guard with the glasses began to climb down, carrying a torch in his mouth. He had a bag over his shoulder. When he reached the floor of the cave he covered his nose and made a wafting gesture with his hand.
I backed away, shielding my eyes. There was the crackle of a walkie-talkie. As the guard approached me, he reached into his bag and pulled out a newspaper. He handed it to me, and then rummaged in his bag for the video camera. He pressed a button and held it to his eye. A recording light came on. He directed me to hold the newspaper up as he filmed. Then he said, and I can hear it now: ‘Go on then, say summat.’
I thought I could recognize these words. They were English. The accent was familiar. Was it Yorkshire?
‘Say summat for the folks back home then. Talk to your wife and kiddy. Go on.’
It was Yorkshire, I was sure of it. South Yorkshire. Bradford or Leeds.
Thoughts were tumbling in my brain but I could not give them shape. I could not deliver them. I had forgotten how to speak.
The Road Between Us Page 29