The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  And those are the lucky ones. The lucky ones! At the lower end of that same hinterland matters are murkier. The people dwelling there go for months, or years, having sex only with themselves, bedding-in (hah!) the poisonous disjunction between commercial fantasy and individual actuality by relying on the same porn that mocks them with their own insufficiencies to bring themselves off. It’s not a recipe for psychological health.

  I’m not saying that the nineties and naughties were a total strike-out zone for me. I dated some women. Let’s be precise and say: I dated four women, relationships lasting between one month and two years. But I couldn’t make it stick, and the time between girlfriends was long and lonely. I tried dating agencies, and personal ads; I pressed friends to hook me up with their single friends. I chatted nervously to people in bars. It did me no good. My face walked always before me, a boy with a red flag preventing my motorcar life from moving into any of the higher gears.

  I’m not bidding for your pity when I say this. Most people live like this, after all, to one degree or another. For most of the time, I simply got on with my life. I worked hard, and got together with my friends, and I read and watched telly and went on holidays. I drank, and pointedly didn’t think about my experiences in the Antarctic, and drank some more. I interviewed poorly for a job at Lancaster, but somehow got it anyway, and moved to that city. There was important work to do. Hubble was launched in 1990, and I was part of a team run out of the universities of Michigan and Lancaster to analyse the data from the telescope’s High Speed Photometer. Then they discovered that the Hubble mirror wasn’t quite the right shape, and fitted cunningly designed optical correction hardware to bring the telescope’s images into focus. The HSP was one of the instruments sacrificed in order to make room for this corrective kit, and my team was at a loose end.

  Four women. I could pretend to be blasé and claim that I can’t remember many of the details, but who would I be kidding? The most heartbreaking one was Molly. She worked as a secretary in the Registry at Lancaster University, and we were set up on a date by mutual friends. She was sweet-tempered and clever, and we had a great deal in common. We hit it off. We dated, and it got serious, and we moved into a flat together, a proper couple. And then we ended up separating, more in sorrow than anger. She didn’t mind that I had two slightly mangled hands, and that I was so self-conscious about the state of my toes that I never once (I think) took my socks off whilst we made love. She didn’t mind that my nose looked so weird, or that ever since Antarctica I had suffered from recurring nightmares, when they, or it, or whatever, congealed – palpably, visually – in my bedroom, resolving into the figure of a young boy, the old haunting, the yelling-aloud, sweat-flowing raging awakening in the small hours. I wept and apologised and she said, ‘It’s OK.’ She didn’t mind. That’s the kernel of the heartbreak, right there. She put up with these things. And I in turn didn’t mind her acne. I’m not talking about a few teenager-y spots on her face. This was an all-body affliction of red-purple bumps, about a third of which crusted into cream-coloured scabs. They were on her face, across her chest, inside her thighs. They turned her back into a Jackson Pollock, and for the ten days leading up to her period were so sore that she couldn’t lie supine. Without them she would have been a most beautiful individual: white-chocolate skin, red hair the colour of Tizer, eyes green as an old pound note, slender body. But with them they were all anybody could see about her. She told me that one of her earlier boyfriends had suggested, as he broke up with her, that in future she ought to date a blind man – the most hurtful thing, she said, anybody had ever said to her. And I nodded, and put on a sympathetic face, and consoled her, and agreed with her that the world was full of bastards. But inside I was as big a bastard as any, because I was thinking: well that wouldn’t work because Molly’s acne was a tactile as well as a visual disfigurement. Running my hands over her body at midnight, with the lights out, I could feel every bump and hollow, every braille-like scab.

  But beggars can’t be choosers, we say, and the truth of the cosmos is that we are all beggars. Molly’s acne, a trick played upon her by some malicious deity, affected all of her skin, even in her most intimate places. On rare days, when her period was a long way away, we might manage some slow and delicately orchestrated penetrative sex. Most of her cycle such a thing was too painful for her to contemplate. We used one another’s hands, and mouths, and did all the things ingenuity suggested, and all the time I was secretly fixating, and I’ll bet she was too, only upon the things we didn’t do. If only we could do that, I thought, in my inmost heart. If only we could have a normal sex life of regular vigorous fucking. And that was what broke us up in the end – not the endless search for medical amelioration of her condition, the long drives to specialist clinics, the sitting in chilly waiting rooms for hours, the hand-holding, the new pills that made her sick (holding her lava-coloured hair out of the way of her face as she knelt at the toilet in our flat), the other new pills that made her so depressed she could hardly get out of bed and her libido vanished altogether. The ointments that I would apply, as she wept with the pain. The weird diets Molly picked up from online sites, and in which I would join her, in a spirit of, I now think, misapplied solidarity. All this was bearable. The secret fantasy of a regular sex life, though, was not. Our fantasies always betray us in the end. Opportunity presented itself, and I spent the night with a feisty, fat woman called Barbara. And Barbara lay there gasping and hooting and I banged away between her legs, like a lusty young blacksmith forging a magic sword with my weighty hammer, and some part of me thought: I simply can’t be doing with this tentative never-quite fucking I’m getting with Molly any longer. So I sat down with Molly and told her it was over, and she didn’t cry; and I agreed to keep paying half the rent until the end of the lease, but I moved out and slept for a month on the couch of a friend called Leo. Of course, things didn’t work out with Barbara, partly because she was rather unhinged, and prone to hitting me with things, sometimes quite heavy things. But mostly it didn’t work out because she got together with a long-distance lorry driver and I decided I had too much self-respect to share her. And actually the worm in the bud was my memory of Molly. All through that month with Barbara, as the two of us worked out energetic bang-bang-bang fucking in bedrooms and on staircases and in the front of my car – all through that my mind kept reverting to Molly. I dreamed of tenderness. Soon enough I found it occurring to me that I really couldn’t be doing with this one-note hammer-away too-obvious fucking I was getting with Barbara. My fantasies were all slender women and delicacy and the lightest touch of a fairy hand. I went back to Molly, and wept, and begged her, but she was cool and firm and told me that the relationship was over. She reminded me I had been the one to kill it. I could hardly disagree. Then I was single for many years, and the more effort I put in to dating the less success I had. I went through the four phases of sexual bereavement: anticipation; rage; despair (‘I’ll never make love to another human being again’) and finally grudging acceptance.

  Dreams were uncomfortable. I slept badly for so long that I grew accustomed to sleeping badly. I had odd little blackouts, such that I would wake, suddenly, lying on the grass outside my flat, in the dark, in the cold, in my pyjamas, in a state of disorientation and fear. I presumed I had sleep-walked outside, and lain down. Several times the police found me about the town and entertained me with the hospitality of their cells. I was drinking a lot, it’s true. Nowadays counselling and support would be made available to somebody in my situation – the victim of a crime, after all. Attempted murder no less! Not back then.

  And the thing is: the attempted murder didn’t bother me. Roy’s unsuccessful attempt to end my life. That sounds blasé, doesn’t it? It’s true though. Curtius was a nutjob. I knew his attack upon me was nothing personal. What bothered me were the hallucinations. The things that I had seen in Antarctica. The thing that I had seen. Not that I had had hallucinations, in the conventional sense; because (as a friend pointed
out), I’d been drugged, and drunk, and sensorily deprived in the Antarctic night. It was hardly surprising that my mind had started playing tricks.

  It was the persistence.

  Looking back, I can see that there was a very long sine wave resonating through my life. One year of misery would be followed by a second, and then would come a glorious third and the nightmares would recede, if never quite vanishing. My concentration and energy levels would improve. I would sleep better, drink less, focus more on my work. Then I would see him – a boy, stringy-framed, simple clothes. A ghost. For a long time I assumed he was me, the ghost of myself as a little boy. I thought this partly because the ghost-boy had a scarred face (although his pattern of scars was different to mine, and although I had not been scarred as a youth). I wondered if perhaps I was dead. Maybe I’d died at the South Pole, and now I was living some ghastly afterlife purgatory. Maybe the ghost of the boy was there to haunt my death with my life. My thirteen-year-old life, back when I was young, and reading Shoot! and 2000 AD on a Saturday morning, and eating Blackjacks and Fruit Salad chews, and cycling my Chopper through the park. It wasn’t easy to get a good look at the ghost. Thirteen, I’d guess. Something like that. That’s the way with ghosts, though, isn’t it? Usually he would be in the corner of my bedroom. Or I might see him standing just outside the tepee of light cast by a street lamp. Or in a crowd, and I would feel him more than see him. Sometimes I got a better look. He didn’t look anything like me.

  The ghost-boy’s appearance marked the point from which the sine wave would begin its inexorable downslide. For a full year the nightmares would increase in vividness and regularity. Back in the blackness and the cold, the southern lights casting an intermittent neon corpse-glow upon me, and the terrors, the terrors, the terrors, gathering all around me. Through a second year the night terrors would get inexorably worse. By year three I was barely able to function. I kept a bottle of gin on my bedside table. I moved to gin (I laugh at myself to write this, but it’s true) because in my sodden mind I told myself the juniper berry element counted as fruit, a glimpse of health, in a way that wasn’t true of my previous favourite tipple, vodka. I also drank a good deal of red wine. My teeth turned blue. My hands shook. This was my morning routine: I would wake, my face crusty with tears shed in the night, a sense of grasping, swallowing horror around me. Then I would take a swig of gin, and grimace, and cough, and take another. The discomfort of the firewater going down my parched throat was part of the routine, as much as was the slow blurring of the edges of my fear. But mostly it was the habit. Once I took my third glug – always three sips in the morning – I would have the sense of a painful but necessary ablution completed. Then: shower. Brushing my teeth. Breakfast cereal. Brushing my teeth again. Getting dressed, and a third brush of the teeth. I told myself I needed to brush my teeth thrice to disguise the fact that I started the day with alcohol, lest my employer get wind and fire me. The truth is: I had become wedded to the OCD routineness of it all.

  My work at the university, substandard for years, finally dipped below the level where the authorities could continue turning their collective blind eye. I was issued with a first formal warning, and booked into training sessions designed to help me, which I either attended drunk, or skipped. I was issued with a second formal warning. My head of department took me aside, after a departmental board, and urged me to join Alcoholics Anonymous. I was distracted by the ghost of the scarred-face boy, walking down the corridor away from us both, visible over her shoulder. If he wasn’t somehow me then why was his face scarred?

  The third formal warning was tantamount to dismissal.

  Unable to land another university job I retrained as a school science teacher. I told myself this was a stopgap, and I would continue applying for university work, but three years into schoolwork it started to dawn on me that I wasn’t ever going to get back into tertiary education. This was depressing, and the depression was made more acute when I lost my teaching job. I’m not writing this narrative in order to give an account of my time as a schoolteacher, so I won’t dwell on this, except to say that I was suspended rather than being sacked. I got three months’ pay, and then the pay stopped, although my suspension carried on, for being drunk in the classroom. I had managed to modify my behaviour to the point where I would not go to work drunk in the morning. But by lunchtime I was usually in a state (maintaining discipline amongst bored and hostile teenagers disinclined to learn any physics, whilst the ghost-boy wandered through the rows of desks) that only several glasses of wine could remedy. After lunch I often went back into class under the influence. It grew more noticeable. The kids laughed about it and told their parents. The parents, when they complained to the head, were not laughing. The head had no option but to suspend me.

  The three months’ suspension passed in a haze. I checked the papers for jobs, and applied for several teaching positions, but didn’t even get to interview. This at a time when the news assured me there was a national shortage of school teachers, especially in the sciences. A double blow to my ego. I signed on (you were still able to do that, back then) and lived for another six months on the dole. Eventually the dole people made my benefit conditional on me working at a series of low-grade employments: cleaning offices; working in a petrol station. So I did that. I applied for a job as a bus driver, and got as far as the sponsored HGV training, when the instructor smelt booze on my breath and dismissed me. He promised me my name would be blacklisted, and advised me not to apply for any more professional driving jobs. I accepted his scorn with as much downbeaten grace as I could muster. Eventually I found work with the council: two weeks on the dust carts, two weeks manning the Bracknell recycling station, where the public drove up to unload cardboard boxes and old toilet cisterns and bags of garden waste into the huge concrete-walled bays. The main downside (apart from the smell, and the low pay) was having to get up at 4 am every working day. I minded this less than some of the others, since sleep was an intermittent and turbulent business for me. The main upside was my gaffer was tolerant of his people taking the occasional snifter on the job. Then again, as the only middle-class, university-educated member of an otherwise solidly working-class, left-school-at-sixteen crew, I cannot pretend that I ever really fitted in.

  I would drive to the depot in my old Vauxhall Astra, through pre-dawn streets and the carroty illumination of street lamps. I rarely saw another vehicle. I was often intoxicated. One time I misjudged a corner, side-swiped a parked van and drove through a hedge into the backlot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, causing – the subsequent court case established – £7,477 worth of damage. I was banned from driving for three years. The car was written off. Since I had been driving under the influence insurers refused to pay out for a new car. I was landed with a monthly instalment plan to pay the fine, the damages, the court fees.

  I eventually got a handle on the drinking. It happens as you get older. It happens, or you don’t get older. Drink hard in your twenties and you’re a regular, fun guy. Keep drinking hard through your thirties and you start to separate yourself from fun, health and indeed other people. If you’re still doing it in your forties it’s probably because you have unresolved stresses and problems which you are clumsily and destructively self-medicating. Drinking hard into your fifties means that you’re blowing hot and cold on ever seeing your sixties. I woke up a week after my fiftieth birthday unable to remember the previous three days, and decided to stop. I could say ‘simple as that’, except that it really wasn’t simple at all. There was a clincher, though, and it was this: my main rationale for drinking was to calm myself in the face of my night terrors. But although I drank a lot, the nightmares refused to go away. I tried a few weeks of facing them without the alcohol, and though the terrors were no better they were certainly not worse. So I quit drinking.

  Without booze jangling my nerves, and without needing to get up at 2 am every night to piss, I actually started sleeping better. Most nights the nightmares were still there, but every
now and again I would sleep right through without disturbance. The oddest thing about that was the nights in which I was unterrified left me not with repose, but with a kind of blankness. Habit accustoms us to anything, including misery and pain. Perhaps especially to those two. Another unexpected consequence of my new sobriety was that my libido perked up again. Given my difficulties in getting laid this was rather more a burden than a joy. But it goes some way to explaining why the arrival of Irma had the effect upon me that it did.

  :2:

  I had a toothache. A simple enough phrase. Does not capture the intensity of the misery. When I went to my dentist, for the first time in decades, I discovered my practice had reclassified me as a private patient, without (of course) my permission. I had a half-hearted argument with the receptionist, who insisted that the practice no longer provided NHS cover at all. I was welcome to try another practice, she said. In considerable pain, exhausted, frustrated, I agreed to be seen privately provided only I was seen. She asked me to sit down. I crouched on the settee in the waiting room, clutching the side of my face. The pre-booked patients went through, one by one, and soon enough the room contained only me and the ghost of the young boy.