by Nick Duerden
It is a bit late to suggest I have seen the error of my ways, not least as it was usually Elena who suffered due to my work, not me. But now I try, conspicuously and not a little self-consciously, to take things easy. After the girls have gone to school, and Elena to work, I linger on the sofa. But it feels wrong to be in front of the television, it feels lazy, so I read instead. The house is too quiet, and so I gravitate helplessly upstairs and switch on the computer. I cannot help it; it is where I am happiest, where I can relax.
I am currently writing a book for someone, a ghosting project. Though this qualifies for the term ‘work’, it is currently unpaid work. Nevertheless, it is intensive, and that suits me. I have been putting in eight-hour days on it for the past six months; at night I dream exclusively of re-writes. My plan now is to write merely for an hour, and then rest for an hour, and so on throughout the day.
Time flies when I work, the hours like minutes. Sat in front of the computer, writing to deadline, I feel like a car that has just been filled up with petrol, ready to go, a heavy foot on the accelerator. If I merely sit in a chair and stare at the wall instead, does this really qualify as proper relaxation? It doesn’t settle my brain. Instead, my brain remains agitated, bored. It craves diversion, attention. The truth is I have no idea how to relax.
This needs to change. Humbled by my perpetual exhaustion, I begin to handle myself with exaggerated care. One afternoon after lunch – having quickly tired of all the red meat, I have now moved on to scrambled eggs and asparagus, protein and antioxidants – I stay rooted to the sofa and watch a film, but time drags. I can’t go swimming, can no longer go out on my bike. I cannot even leave the house these days without it resulting in the most ravaging exhaustion, in which every muscle feels spent of all its energy, and I am flat as a punctured tyre, a good night’s sleep doing precisely nothing to alleviate the symptoms.
This is hard to take in, and I struggle with it daily. I still have no real idea what is happening to me, nor why. I know that the vast array of vitamins I am taking each morning, the transdermal minerals included – total cost at well over £200 – appear to be doing nothing at all.
One day, feeling particularly down, I decide to write to Dr Dolittle, explaining the abrupt downward spiral that occurred after seeing him and telling him that I need answers, and that I would be very grateful if he could proffer some. It takes him over a month to respond.
He wrote that my reaction didn’t surprise him, that it was not untypical of patients once they knew that something was seriously wrong. He suggested I ask my GP to refer me to my local hospital for some graded exercise therapy sessions.
In the meantime, I read a book, a memoir, about a writer’s search for relief from the chronic pain he has been suffering for decades, and it is here, perhaps consciously for the first time, that I learn about the link between the mind and the body, and how psychosomatic – so often a term of ridicule, the suggestion that the illness is only ever ‘in the mind’ – has been accepted as fact in the East, specifically India, for centuries. Why wouldn’t the mind influence the body, and vice versa? Why the shame in having a physical condition exacerbated by the mental response to it?
My life over the next few weeks shrinks in increments until it is wafer thin. No swimming, no cycling, no trips into town for work because I am not, for the time being, chasing work. I have one daily excursion, and it proves difficult enough: the school run. It’s a 10-minute walk, so I cycle it in three. Because it is summer, we stop on the way home at the playground. We get back to the house perhaps an hour later, my body roaring its disapproval: prickles of extreme tiredness burning in my arms, my thighs, the backs of my eyes. My eyelids, I’ve become aware, ache, something I didn’t know was possible. I crave only oblivion, to switch off to everything. If I could hibernate, I would.
Slowly, I start actively seeking journalism jobs again, paying jobs, sending emails to editors about jobs that, if commissioned, I can do on the phone or, via cab, in town. I do not tell them about my condition, of course, because they don’t need to know. If the opportunity comes for a job overseas, I make excuses. I don’t travel more than 10 miles for a job now. If nothing else, I am spared the jet lag.
I later learn that in my ability to keep working, albeit duly compromised, I am lucky. Most sufferers are rarely able to continue working at all, even from home. Many experience a state known as brain fog, an inability to focus on anything, which consequently renders even the most sedentary work impossible. They cannot concentrate on reading, on watching TV. Some are too tired to shower, to make it to the toilet by themselves.
My fatigue seems only to express itself in my outer shell, the bones, the muscles. My mind is still firing, still overactive. The copy I deliver is unremarked upon by editors (this is a good thing; they mostly only respond to complain), and when I finish ghosting the memoir, the book finds a publisher. The fact that I am able to work at all is something I do not take for granted.
By the third week of July, school is over, and my relief is considerable. Now I have no reason to go out at all. I can just rest, rest until I am better.
‘It’s not good for you, staying in all the time,’ says Elena, concerned.
I agree with her, of course, but every time I go out now, I come back catatonic. It is the most unsettling sensation. It scares me. I tell her that I am simply responding to what my body appears to be telling me: stop. In truth, all I want to do is retreat, be by myself. Because I’m clearly no good around anybody else.
The start of the summer holidays feels like torture. Amaya thrums with an energy I can see radiating off her. She cannot understand why we are not going out. She is used to me taking her everywhere, on the bike, on the bus, the train, to shops, playgrounds, to the lions in Trafalgar Square, Hamleys. But now here we are in the kitchen, and now in the living room. For a change of scenery, we will perhaps go up to my room so she can play Mathletics on the computer. She is bored. She wants to go swimming, to the zip wire. She wants a play date, ice cream.
One afternoon, we go on a trip to the corner shop. We are going to make cookies, Elena’s suggestion, and for this we need eggs, flour, sugar, things to sprinkle on top. Her excitement is propulsive, and she pulls my hand as we walk along the road and round the corner, saying faster, faster. The corner shop to me suddenly feels like an exotic foreign land. I used to visit daily, but now haven’t in over a month. It is not the same man behind the counter but a different one, a stranger. He nods hello. We find what we need, then I go to look at the newspapers, which as ever are cruelly arranged the wrong way round, upside down, to deter loiterers like me from browsing. We go to the till and pay.
It is on the way back that I feel it, the dizziness, the seeming solidifying of muscles. Inside me, something is flaring, then melting, oozing into a gravitational pull. Suddenly I am furious. This is ridiculous. All of it, highly illogical. I do not understand it, and I refuse to accept it. I can’t, I won’t. Pull yourself together!
I look down at Amaya, at her bright smiling eager face, urging me home, into the kitchen, into aprons: big cook, little cook.
We make a triumphant mess in the kitchen, flour everywhere, broken eggshells in the mix, Amaya laughing, jubilant, eager to learn; my beautiful little girl with cake mixture stretching her smile from ear to ear. But the whisking proves my undoing. I don’t seem to be able to summon the strength.
‘Shall I do it?’ Amaya asks.
I find the strength now, as a matter of urgent necessity, and so I whisk and whisk as required, completing it only because I cannot face a five-year-old’s disappointment.
We arrange the cookies onto a baking tray, one blob bleeding into the next, then we slide the tray into the oven. We now have to wait for a quarter of an hour. I suggest that Amaya goes and watches television. She does, and I promptly curl up into a ball on the kitchen floor, vibrating with a tiredness that feels like a viral attack. I want to fight back, but cannot. My mind spins wildly. What is happening to me? How c
an I make this stop?
Soon, Elena is taking the girls to Spain to visit family, and leaving me home alone for 14 days. She wants to cancel, to stay with me, but the truth is I cannot wait for them to go. I am not functioning as either husband or father, and their daily presence is a painful reminder. Perhaps alone I shall feel more equipped to . . . to what, exactly?
I don’t know. All I know is that I will miss them terribly, but that I need the solitude, the quiet, the brain space to start to begin to digest all this.
But then, a day after the cookies, the elderly next-door neighbour turns visibly yellow and calls for help. I see him being stretchered into an ambulance, to hospital, never to return. His son, arguably wayward, definitely drunk, is his sole beneficiary, and just a few days later takes possession of the dilapidated semi-detached house attached to ours, which he promptly transforms into Party Central.
And so all that prospect of peace and quiet: gone, vanished, just like that.
Four
The first time I see him is through the living-room window. I am not spying, though venetian blinds can sometimes give that impression. He is striking: big, bulky, of indeterminate age, mid-30s probably. Bald, unshaven, fag in mouth, a photofit stereotype writ large in his England shirt, forearm tattoos. He is carrying a corner-shop plastic bag, red with white stripes, not a Bag for Life by anyone’s standards. A six-pack is distorting its shape to breaking point.
There had never been noise from our next-door neighbour previously, and only now do I realise that this was due not to some very solid brick soundproofing but rather to the fact that he was a quiet man. A sound comes through the wall now, the kchww of a can being opened. Then the TV, blaring. Presently, an operatic belch, which sets a pattern for the rest of the afternoon: the constant burble of the television, a succession of kchwws, a great many burps.
He drives a van, white, but doesn’t seem to work. Whenever, still not spying, I see him pass my window, he is returning from the corner shop, another red-and-white-striped plastic bag struggling to keep hold of its contents. He likes to stand in the concreted-over back garden smoking a cigarette and shouting into a mobile phone. Often, he sounds angry.
Friday nights, he hosts parties, post-pub things, half a dozen new friends, more. No music, just a lot of talking and arguing and laughter wafting through the walls. It’s like the walls aren’t there at all. The noise permeates my house, up the stairs and into my bedroom. Around two or three in the morning, I become aware of an acoustic guitar, somebody giving a passable rendition of ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’, then ‘Wonderwall’. I check the glow of my alarm clock, and figure that things will wind down soon. They don’t. I toss and turn, and drag my pillow over my face.
It is gone four now, so late it is almost early. If he is lucky, and he often is, a woman stays over, accompanying him to the bedroom whose back wall is shared with mine. My new neighbour is a silent lover, but she, whoever she is, has taken note from pornography. Her orgasms are laboured and screeching and, I am sure of it, faked.
I begin to have fantasies in which I wield baseball bats, no mercy shown.
The Friday-night parties prove popular. They begin to start on Thursdays, sometimes Wednesdays. They go on until Sunday, occasionally Monday, even Tuesday. They go on all night. They never get too raucous, there is never the thump-thump-thump of heavy bass, just the constant hum of people drunk, stoned and, later, wasted. In the mornings, someone will stumble into the garden and vomit enthusiastically by the shed, then return to the kitchen for more. Occasionally, night bleeds into day and nobody notices, ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ serenading my protein-rich lunch. Occasionally things get ugly, mostly with the women who extend their parameters of tolerance for one another until they cannot, at which point they start screaming, one a cunt, the other a fucking slag, and it spills out into the garden where the men separate them with placatory offers of cigarettes, one each.
When my family comes back from Spain, it is Elena who goes to complain. They greet her warmly, offer apologies and invite her in for a drink, a drag. But they are forgetful, and careless, and cannot regulate their volume. We begin sleeping/non-sleeping on the sofa bed upstairs in my room and experimenting with earplugs, and waste hours online looking for houses in different parts of London, different parts of the country, preferably detached, with a moat.
In time, my pacifist wife begins to share my fantasies. She too wants a baseball bat to wield with impunity.
For the two weeks my family are away, despite the racket next door, I retreat into a shell I didn’t even know I had. The house becomes my hermetically sealed cocoon. I barely go out. Days are slow. Each morning I spend a couple of hours writing, then head downstairs for a change of scenery, sit on a chair and read. Occasionally, mindful of my new protein needs, I boil an egg for a mid-morning snack, which, if nothing else, helps pass the time. The heating of the water takes three minutes, the boiling of the egg takes four. Eating it is a regrettably swift business, and 30 seconds later I am back in the living room, on my chair, finding my place in my book. Every little thing I do I make last as long as I can, so that later might come sooner.
There is little work. It is summer; everyone is away. The ghosting project is all but finished, and I am delaying the gruelling editing process, because while I am bored, I’m not that bored.
The sun is out –it is by now late August, so sunshine is no guarantee – and I sit in the garden and breathe the air. The neighbour has a friend around. The friend has a dog. I make my way upstairs to the girls’ bedroom window to peer: a Staffordshire Bull Terrier, a malevolent grimace to its Joker grin.
Mid-afternoon seems to drag towards a permanent standstill. It is too early to watch TV, and I have done all the work I can do for one day. Two hours until dinner; what to do? I have a hot bath filled with Epsom salts, Epsom salts another condiment believed to be helpful for those fatigued. Absorbing the magnesium is said to be good for the muscles, which is all I need to know. By now I view my body as a kind of petri dish upon which to attempt all manner of experiments in pursuit of health restored. I am so used to all the daily vitamins that I no longer need to be reminded which to take when. I have come to loathe the application of the so-called Magic Minerals, but I continue to apply them every morning just in case. Almost everything I am doing now to this end is just in case.
Dinner, delivered on Monday morning by Ocado and a rare opportunity for human contact, is health-conscious, and unaccompanied by wine. It is evening now, so I can watch TV without feeling awful about it. Before sitting down, in the dark, to watch the Danish noir I am by now addicted to, I go out for My Walk. This essentially comprises my entire daily exercise regime, but to call it a ‘walk’ is exaggeration. Because the slightest exercise outdoors has swiftly rendered me worthless this past month, I find myself becoming helplessly fearful of it. So the walk is minimal, and quick, my destination each night the postbox just off the main road around the corner. To get there, in a pair of trainers so unused of late that they almost revert to being new, I have to walk out of my door to the end of the street, turn left at the corner, and then up to the main road. I am never good with measuring distances, but let’s say it’s 10 parked cars. Now I am at the main road. I take a left, walk on a little further, then stop, look both ways and cross the road. Then the postbox, which I touch ceremoniously. Now return.
I am back on my sofa within four minutes of having left it, a journey that once would have taken me 30 seconds. The sofa is still warm. I switch on the television as the exhaustion goes about its curious business, like streams of cigarette smoke, or the liquid in a lava lamp, extending into my muscles and tendons, perhaps even the cells, and weighing everything down with the tenacity of quicksand. It is hard to believe that the legs that have taken me to all sorts of places for the previous 40 years now find it quite so difficult to do something quite so effortless.
I am in bed by 10. I would take drugs to sleep but ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ will only wake me up ag
ain by midnight, and then again at two, at three.
Morning comes early, and I am still carrying the fatigue from last night’s outing to the postbox. It will take almost 14 hours until I feel ready, mentally and physically, to dare to repeat the journey again.
When the next-door neighbour is at last fast asleep, face down in all likelihood, then I suppose it is true that, in addition to my solitude, I have my much-craved peace and quiet. Elena suggested I might try meditation while she and the girls were away, another recommendation she had come across that sufferers can, and often do, benefit from. Dolittle had suggested similar. I browse it online, and come across something called yoga nidra, a sleep-like state of meditation. It isn’t easy dismantling all of the long-held prejudices I have harboured for anything remotely New Age, but needs must, and so I cue up a 35-minute practice on Spotify, click Play, and assume the correct pose on the floor, on Elena’s yoga mat, arms by my side, eyes closed.
I have never meditated before, nor ever seriously considered it, despite encouragement, and sometimes outright pressure, to do so. I had grown up with a mother who was very New Age in her outlook. She did yoga in the ’70s, and was vegetarian at a time when such a thing was viewed with deep suspicion. She cooked meat for me only reluctantly, and while friends got crisps and chocolate snacks in their school lunch boxes, I would get chicory and celery. In the late 1980s, as I was finishing with education and getting ready to leave home, she became increasingly committed to Tai Chi, then quit her job in order to give herself over to it entirely.
After I developed repetitive strain injury in the early 1990s, she felt she might be able to help. I had already made my position clear on Tai Chi, that it was not for me, and so she recommended instead I try the Alexander Technique, which teaches people to better align their bodies, to sit properly and learn to relax the muscles and ease the otherwise perpetual build-up of tension. She felt this would help correct my posture and, theoretically at least, ease the pain, which was constant. My reaction was a knee-jerk derision long fostered by a diet of TV comedy and playground mockery that poured scorn on anything that lay outside of the limited realms of what passed for ordinary. Everything New Age was funny because it was claptrap, all yoga and falafel and open-toed sandals, and so all too easy to laugh at.