I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death

by Maggie O'Farrell

  She is making a pot of tea and I am clearing plates from the table. We both step around the room, around the dog, around the circular table, around each other, by instinct. I could navigate this space with my eyes closed, if called upon to do so. From down the corridor, the voices of my children, playing with the array of toys my mother keeps in her cupboards, can be heard, rising and falling, exclaiming and negotiating.

  Tea-making is a sacred, circumscribed ritual in this house. I would never presume to undertake it, would never encroach on this most delicate of tasks. There are several steps that must be followed, one leading mysteriously from the next: I can never quite remember the sequence, have always been too impatient to learn, unlike my sisters, who enact the same ritual in the same way in their own kitchens.

  The correct pot must be selected, as should the most suitable cosy. Warming must take place, for a prescribed amount of time, and this water must absolutely be discarded, with a quick, derisive flick into the sink. Only then may the tannin-dark pot be filled, first with tea leaves, measured out with a specially appointed pewter spoon, then boiling water. On goes the cosy—knitted or quilted, mostly embroidered—then steeping occurs. On the draining board, cups (bone china, always) and milk at the ready.

  My mother places a glass of tap water on the table, in front of the chair that was mine when we were growing up, in deference to my non-tea-drinking habit. She knows I won’t partake of what’s brewing in the teapot, so she provides me with the only liquid I reliably drink.

  I am the sole tea-abstainer in my family. I think they regard this as a baffling perversion. To me, tea tastes like dried lawn-clippings, diluted leaf mould, watered-down compost mixed with a dash of bovine bodily fluid. I have never been able to stomach it.

  As she lifts the pot to the table, she asks me what I’m working on at the moment, and, as I swallow my water, I tell her I’m trying to write a life, told only through near-death experiences.

  She is silent for a moment, readjusting cosy, milk jug, cup handles. “Is this your life?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say, a touch nervously. I have no idea how she will feel about this. “It’s not…it’s just…snatches of a life. A string of moments. Some chapters will be long. Others might be really short.”

  We talk for a moment about what will be included. My childhood illness, nearly being run over, childbirth, dehydration from dysentery. There will be things in the book I have told her about and others I have never mentioned: I don’t enlighten her as to these now. She asks if I’ll write about having septicaemia, and I say no. I don’t remember it. I was too young. And also I don’t think I was in danger of dying, was I?

  She doesn’t answer but turns her head to look out of the window, at the birds who flit and flap around the feeders she hangs from her trees.

  “There was that other time,” she says, “when you didn’t stay in the car. Do you remember?”

  “No,” I say.

  “You were three or so—it was when your sister was a baby. We’d been to the shops and I’d driven the car into the garage. I told you to stay put, to stay in your seat,” she gives me a look, almost a nod, “but…”

  “But I didn’t?” I supply.

  “No,” she says, “you didn’t. I had the shopping out and was reaching up to slam the boot shut when I saw you, in that split second. You’d somehow got out and come around to where I was. You were right there, standing beside me, your head in the way of the boot. It nearly got you.” She holds up her fingers, narrowly parted. “Nearly, nearly,” she repeats. “I hoicked you back just in time. When I think what might have happened if…” She doesn’t finish her sentence, shaking her head.

  There is a short silence in the kitchen. I am thinking that perhaps I should apologise for being the kind of child who never did as she was told, persistently putting herself in the way of danger. I should also thank her for saving me.

  There is, of course, no greater fear for a parent than the loss of a child. I know this; my mother knows this. We have both lived it. She and I have both sailed too close, too many times, to those terrifying dark rocks. It’s something we share but rarely speak of.

  I am still casting about for what to say in response when my children appear, pouring into the room, filling it with talk and shouts and wooden toys and need. Need for drinks, for sliced apples, for scones, for jam and butter.

  As I drive home, I think about the story. I have no memory of it at all, which seems strange. You’d think that something so dramatic would leave a mark. Perhaps, I decide, as I drive, my lack of recall is a testament to my mother’s handling of the situation. She must have had not only quick reflexes but a way of containing the event, internalising it, so that none of the panic leaked out to me.

  I remember the garage, however, a fascinating and slightly frightening place with oil stains, slick and pungent, on the concrete floor, which, if looked at one way, could resolve into rainbows, iridescent and fleeting. It had dark red doors and a window behind which a blue-tit once became trapped, its wings whirring in terror, its black beak driving again and again into the glass, unable to comprehend that it wouldn’t yield. My father wrestled with the catch, with the painted-shut sill before it finally gave and the bird flew out, swooped once over the flowerbed, then away over the hedge. I remember it as a cobwebby, dim place, filled with the bladed lawnmower, the heads of spades, an axe resting on a high nail. A rat was seen in there once, which occasioned a visit from the Rat Catcher, a man with thick, high boots, leather gauntlets, a bottle of poison, an empty hessian bag and a noosed stick. He went into the garage and shut the door; we watched from the sitting room. When he emerged, his bag was no longer empty but weighted down with something curved, slack and soft.

  One summer we set up a museum in the garage, exhibits arranged over workbench and chest freezer. They included the skeleton of our tortoise, disinterred from the ground, some stamps from Malaysia, several trilobites and some pieces of Connemara coral.

  Our tabby cat, thrillingly, chose the garage as the place to give birth. We would visit her with her new family, awed and delighted, to worship at the side of the cardboard box, to watch the four squirming bodies as they searched for sustenance in her grey-striped fur.

  My mother instructed us not to touch the kittens, not yet, and we nodded gravely. As soon as she had gone back to the kitchen, however, I told my younger sister to keep watch at the garage door. Obviously, I reasoned to her, there was no way I wasn’t going to touch these kittens. No way at all. The keen joy of plunging in your hands and lifting up all four kittens in a mewing, writhing mass and burying your face in their aliveness, their softness, their miniature faces, their never-walked on paws: how could I forgo this?

  The cat lifted her head and watched me with green eyes that were alert but also absolving. She knew it wasn’t possible for me to follow my mother’s edict—there was no way I could. She purred when I put the kittens gently back, stretching out an ecstatic paw to touch me on the wrist.

  She lived an astonishing twenty-one years, that cat. There are photographs of me holding her as a gawky ten-year-old, with patched knees and teeth too large and numerous for my mouth, and photographs of me as an adult, less gawky, less patched, with her on my lap.

  Years later, in the middle of a cold winter, I will be pregnant with my first child and living abroad, snow-bound, in a deep-cut valley. My sister, now a vet, will call to say that the cat, who, a lifetime ago, gave birth to some kittens in a cardboard box, is sick, too sick. She cannot save her this time—the cat won’t survive another oper-ation. My sister will be saying sorry and asking me if it’s okay to put her down, and I will be saying, of course, whatever you think is right.

  She and I will be clutching the ends of our respective phone lines, separated by countries and mountains and seas, reluctant to end the call because we both know what will happen after we do. I will be reminded of the time we were separated by the length of the garage—a place where I had so nearly and unknowingly com
e to a nasty end—as she stood, a loyal and anxious sentinel, keeping watch, her head turning between me and the house, as I bent over the box and lifted the kittens aloft.

  CRANIUM

  1998

  A man and a woman are walking beside a river. The water is so slow-moving as to be almost current-less, motionless. They pause on a bridge, looking down at their reflections in the mirror-flat, leaf-dinted water: he looks at hers, she looks at his. She has been collecting acorns in her pockets, greenish-brown and set inside their cups, and as they have walked, she has sifted them with her fingertips and ascertained that, yes, each acorn will fit only inside its own cup. No other cup will do.

  The woman is me. The man is—well, never mind.

  They are talking about their situation, their conundrum. They have fallen in love, instantly, surprisingly, dizzyingly, but there are problems. There are obstacles. Other people stand in their way—other hearts, other minds, other situations.

  The woman puts out her hand to touch the dry stalk of a reed, as she talks, saying something about how can they, how could they, they could never, could they? The man reaches out to warn her, saying that he was once with a friend who cut his finger so deeply on a reed that he needed three stitches at a cottage hospital.

  “A cottage hospital?” the woman repeats. She has never heard of such things. She says she is picturing a hospital with a thatched roof, smoke spiralling out of a chimney, staffed perhaps by squirrels or mice in aprons, picture-book style.

  The man raises an eyebrow at her. “They exist. I assure you.” He hasn’t, she notices, let go of her hand.

  They talk about reeds, about stitches, about times they have had them, because they need a break, perhaps, from talking about themselves, about their unresolvable scenario, about options, all of which seem at once unavoidable and yet unconscionable. Still holding her hand, he lifts his shirt to show her a childhood scar on his abdomen; she sees a tanned slice of stomach, the waistband of his underwear riding above his jeans, a line of hair disappearing south. She wants to turn away, she wants to keep looking; she wants to bite him, like a peach. She thinks, how can we? How can we not? This is a bad idea, this is the best idea, the only idea; she is looking for a private, shielded place, she is scanning for a way to make good her escape. The moment seesaws between them.

  Suddenly a dog appears, out of nowhere, out of the forest, popping out of the trees like a jack-in-a-box. It has a half-white, half-black face and a waving plume of a tail. It bounds towards them, as if they are the two people it most wants to see in the whole wide world, circling them, leaping and yapping, its tail swishing from side to side, its face split wide in a canine grin.

  They exclaim, they bend to stroke it, to run their hands along its warm, furred flanks.

  When they walk on, the dog comes too, darting ahead on the path, looping back, diving between them, begging for sticks to be selected, tossed, re-thrown. It thrusts itself past their ankles as they continue to talk, it plunges in and out of the undergrowth, it gazes up at them, panting, adoring, as if rapt by what they are saying, as if signalling its complete agreement.

  At one point, the walk takes them along a stretch of road. The dog trots between them, nose down. They hear the grind of a large vehicle behind them so they step to the verge, still talking. A huge orange lorry comes hurtling down the lane, trees flinching away from it, tyres consuming tarmac.

  As they wait for it to pass, it occurs to the woman that she has no idea if the dog has any road sense. Some dogs, she knows, do; others don’t. The lorry is almost upon them when she bends down to put her hand on the dog’s collar, to ensure it doesn’t suddenly spring into the road, into the path of the lorry: she is acting entirely by instinct, thinking only of protecting this animal, who has appeared from nowhere, who approaches the world and all it has to offer with such trust, such unalloyed joy. She feels the mechanism, the powered steel of the lorry pass near her—too near. The hair on her head is flicked by the side of the vehicle; she is sensible of the wheel arch skimming the top of her cranium: metal at a considerable velocity just passing over skull. A centimetre, half a centimetre more and it would have hit her square on the head. The horror of this near-decapitation rises, like a tide, from her feet, her legs, rushing over her in a single, distinct sensation. She could have died, right here, right now, holding on to the man with one hand and the dog with the other. A minuscule unit of measurement in the wrong direction and that would have been it. Curtains. Kicked the bucket. Carked it. End of the line. Lights out. Bitten the dust. Gone the way of all flesh. Given up the ghost.

  She has never been good at judging the correct distance between herself and other entities, knowing how much space she takes up, how much clearance she needs.

  The lorry zooms on. They are caught in its backdraught, the man, the woman, the dog, their bodies overcome by motion, by speed. She straightens up. She releases the dog’s collar. She is aware of having dodged something, of having pulled her leg out of the trap, once again, at the last moment.

  She says nothing to the man. He does not need to know. There is already so much at stake. He is putting his arm about her shoulders and pressing her to his side, to his chest, to the muscle and bone nearest his heart. She rests her cheek against the woollen nap of his coat and breathes there, picturing the molecules of him, his scent, his skin, his clothes, his hair, drawn down into her lungs, along the pathways and tributaries of her bronchial tubes, her alveoli, dissolving there into her bloodstream and being carried away, sporing and spinning into the most secret junctions of her self.

  They walk on, along the road and back into the forest, where the light is patched and green, where the path is winding, diverging, not always clear. The dog comes too.

  INTESTINES

  1994

  I open my eyes to see the French doctor from the restaurant standing over my bed, fists on hips, elbows bent at right angles to her body. I stare at her, astonished, wanting to ask her what on earth she is doing in my room. Has she lost her way? Her mind? Her key? Has she opened the wrong door?

  I can’t remember how long it is since I chatted to her, over breakfast, how long I’ve been lying here, ill. Days, certainly—spent prostrate on the unforgiving mattress or crouched in the narrow bathroom—but I have lost track of time by this point, lost track of everything.

  She reaches out and touches her hand to my forehead, my arm. I hear her say to Anton, whose face hovers in the background, fearful, dismayed: “She needs to go to hospital.”

  Since I arrived here, in this small Chinese town, however long ago it was, I have been unwell, unable to eat much, needing to visit the loo with tiresome frequency, feeling enervated, listless, not sleeping. Then I was gripped by sudden pains, in the middle of the night, and started throwing up; I couldn’t stop. It woke Anton, who came and held my hair out of the way. What came out of me was streaked with blood, mucoid, meaty in texture.

  Something is moving within me, deep in the coiled channels of my stomach, something with claws, with fangs, with evil intent. It is gaining strength, I can feel it, drawing it off me. It is as though I have swallowed a demon, a restive one that turns and fidgets, scraping its scales against my innards. I must fold into myself, breathe, grip my hands into fists until the spasm passes.

  And now here is this stranger, this French woman, saying I must go to hospital. It is, I decide, too much. I shut my eyes, aiming to block her out, and Anton, and their plans. It seems to me in this moment that there is nowhere so lovely, so restful, as this painted concrete box of a Chinese hotel room. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stay right here, on these peach-coloured nylon sheets, with the ceiling fan churning above me, with the curtains shut to keep out the glancing sunlight. Only here can I square up to this demon; only here can I try to gather my resources to face it.

  I have reached that dangerous stage in dehydration, in fever, the point where you give up, where you just want to stay where you are, lying curled up on your mattress.


  “No,” I say, but I can barely raise a whisper. “I’m okay.”

  “She has to go,” the French doctor says, her words clipped but calm. She isn’t talking to me. “It must be now.”

  They lift me between them—I am light, lighter than I’ve ever been, I’ll discover later, even in my self-whittling teenage years, the flesh melting from me in a matter of days—and I cling to the peach-coloured mattress.

  “No,” I protest, kicking, delirious, furious, the spiked demon twisting within me. “I don’t want to go. I want to stay here. Put me down.”

  Anton half drags, half carries me through the hotel lobby and out of the glass doors, where a rank of motorised rickshaws is idling at the kerb; the French woman dematerialises, yet another saviour never to be seen again. I don’t recall much of the rickshaw ride, other than Anton holding me by the arm as I dry-retch out of the open door. There is, I observe to myself, even through illness and pain, nothing left in my system. Nothing at all—no liquid, no food, no bile, even. I am utterly emptied out. My skin is scalding, desiccated. It hurts to move my eyes inside their parched sockets. But, still, I don’t want to go to hospital. I want only to be left alone.

  I realise now that what I had hit was the tipping-point. My body, invaded by an amoebic parasite picked up on the Buddhist mountain of Emeishan, had for several days battled for supremacy. I had eaten carefully, I had taken rehydration salts, I had rested. I had done everything you are meant to do when you get travellers’ tummy, but this was something different. My fever was raging up in the forties; I had been vomiting and shitting, with increasing frequency, for several days. Every last thing was out of my body. The amoeba was winning. What I thought I wanted was to be left in peace but what this really meant was that I was giving up: I was ready to die, to abandon the fight. It was easier than staying alive.