by Anna Lyndsey
On returning to the caravan, we find it is so cold that the gas bottles have frozen, which means we can’t put the heater on, or make toast or cups of tea. We have cold water and bread and butter for breakfast, wearing coats, and it is not until eleven o’clock that the sun, now blazing out of a blue void, warms things enough to allow the gas to flow.
During the days, Pete and his camera go off on explorations of their own, usually coming back for lunch. I stay in the van. I read magazines and listen to music, look at maps and plan our evening excursions. I write celebratory postcards to everyone I know. “I’m on holiday!” they announce, words that people will not be expecting to hear from me, and which, for extended periods, I myself did not expect to use again.
But most of the time, I just stare out of the window. Most of the caravan’s windows are kept shaded, but there is one that looks out into the feathery fronds of a cypress tree, dotted with small round cones. Sunlight dapples the foliage with twenty different shades of green, and the wind sets it dancing, and now and again a bird flies in and bounces for a while on a flexible stem.
I gaze at the rectangle of waving green, and my starved eyes revel in it and feast upon it, for hours. Even though I’m sealed in my white box, I feel the earth beneath me and the sky above me, I feel the tall trees that surround the site enfold me, and I am at peace.
Snake
Somehow, I have overdone it. Among the thousands of delicate calculations I must make each day, one has gone awry. Perhaps I stood for too long in the sunny kitchen making a chicken stir-fry, when I should simply have stuffed the beast into the oven and got out. Or perhaps I went out slightly too early at dusk or, pleased with my progress, decided to risk, on my evening constitutional, a slightly smaller hat.
It hardly matters now. Every mundane activity is a potential doorway to disaster; in the game of snakes without ladders that is my life, snakes lurk on every side. I have plunged down one; once more I am in total darkness, my skin flaming, waiting for the burning to subside. And when it does, days, weeks, perhaps months stretch out before me, while my skin slowly stabilises before I may be granted the boon of another slow climb back into the light.
The first days after a relapse are days of rage. I go over in my mind the minutiae of events that have led to my downfall, trying to pinpoint what I did wrong. I castigate myself for an over-optimistic idiot, an inattentive fool, a stupid blundering imbecile. I spool back in my mind to that fatal stir-fry or hubristic hat, and feel how easy, how simple, how trivial it would have been to have done something different. I yearn to turn back time, not to right a gross wrong, but to amend some minor mundane choice. Surely this should be allowed? It is so insignificant a thing, there could hardly be any weird or unintended consequences, any dropped stitches in the fabric of history, if I were to be permitted to have worn a different hat.
I visualise my alternative, in desperate vivid detail, paint it across my mind as I sit flaming in the darkness, see myself put on my coat and boots, reach out for my hat, open the front door, set off into the golden sunset, walk up the hill, do all that I did do but with a wider brim shading my face. Could I not by sheer force of will, by repetition, hammer this version on to the past, like a pattern hammered on to steel? But time spools resolutely forward, like the tapes, the endless tapes, of talking books to which I now return.
The stage after rage is despair. I no longer chastise myself. Instead, I feel I am accursed, that periods of progress are granted to me only so that they may be snatched away; that I am engaged upon a Sisyphean enterprise, but unlike Sisyphus, I never even reach the top of the hill, to look out, even briefly, over the universe, before my boulder crashes back down; that the task of perpetually second-guessing the whims of my skin is simply impossible, like a problem in a maths exam where there has been a misprint in the figures, and the equation, despite hours of earnest, intelligent effort, can never be solved.
I fall into a dark well. The darkness itself starts to have a horror for me—I have to force myself in and quickly slam the door. I find myself perpetually drifting out to fetch a drink, or just walk up and down the stairs. Like a bubble of air in water, or a toy duck in the bath, I have to be kept forcibly submerged.
The huge black fish called suicide breaks from its mud hole. Back and forth, back and forth it swims. I feel the steady beat of its fins and see with unprecedented clarity the gleam of its spiked teeth. Ten times a day tears fill my eyes, my face twists, I give a few short howls. My talking book is failing to provide the balm of distraction. Its attempted seduction seems callow and unskilful, its characters angsting about problems that are trivial in comparison to my own. To see, to smell, to move about the world before you die—these huge boons granted, why fret about the rest? I become hypersensitised to literary descriptions of nature or the weather, no matter how brief or clichéd. The opening of curtains on to a fresh crisp morning, a view of distant mountains, evening in a summer garden—all prickle me with horrible doubt: perhaps I will not see such things again.
In a phone call to my mother, I break down. My mother acts fast—a visit is arranged. My brother Sam will come the next day, from London. He has cancelled something he had planned that afternoon.
My brother is a gentle soul. He makes soup for our lunch. Perturbed by not finding an onion, he chops a whole head of garlic into the pot. The soup is delicious, but after a long discussion about music and politics in my dark sealed-up room, the garlicky miasma which has developed there can be cut with a knife.
BY THE FIFTH or sixth day, I have reached acceptance, slipping back into the remembered rhythm of my dark days. “See, it is not so hard,” whisper my walls to me. “You have done this before.”
And days, weeks, or months pass.
Games to Play in the Dark 6: Going Through the Alphabet
This is a game to play with other people or, in extremis, with yourself. Choose a category—birds, say, or colours. Then go through the alphabet and try to name an example starting with each letter. The game is collaborative rather than competitive—the pleasure lies in getting as close as possible to a full alphabetical set.
The categories are usually dictated by the interests and obsessions of the participants. With Pete, I play footballers, scientists and mathematical terms. With my brother, fictional detectives, methods of murder and world-historical figures. With my mother, operas, novelists and words that start and end with the same letter. Sometimes the category chosen proves too restrictive and a second category is added. This was the origin of “figure of speech or rude word,” a memorable and entertaining round.
The Unreplenished Mind
The body starves, when nourishment stops. At first, to keep going, it turns to its reserves. It uses accumulated stores of fat for fuel. Then, as these run low, it is obliged to cannibalise more fundamental tissues. Muscles waste. Systems and processes break down. The skin becomes dry and scaly. Infections take hold. The heartbeat becomes irregular. The temperature drops.
The body eats itself.
As with a body, so with a mind. When the daily ration of fresh experience dries up, the mind turns first to its accumulated stores. For a while, it keeps functioning apparently as normal, drawing its anecdotes, points of reference and topics of conversation from its rich and many-layered reserves.
But slowly, slowly, the stock diminishes. I begin to spot the signs. I tell stories that I have told before. I speak more about my childhood, reaching further back into the store, rummaging for something new. Over and over I deploy my ten years as a working girl, so I can talk with Pete about idiotic HR departments and lunatic IT (life in large organisations does not seem to change much).
This steady drawing-down of memories causes strange disturbances within the reserves. The extraction of a single item can lead to the unexpected collapse of a whole shelving system, and the sudden surfacing of people and incidents I have not thought about for years; then they haunt my waking moments and my dreams.
Sometimes there is pleasure
to be had from the fragments that float up into consciousness as the mind feeds upon its past. But my main emotion is fear. I wonder what will happen when the accumulated reserves run out. Will the mind, like the body, start to consume its own supporting structures, eat into the very sinews of consciousness? Will my clear-sightedness blur into confusion, the curve of my wit grow slack, the zip and dart of my thoughts slow to a meander, before all dissolves into mush?
What becomes of the unreplenished mind?
No one can say.
One day I talk to my brother about the time before the darkness when we took the train together on the Far North line, from Inverness to Thurso, and the train was full of Celtic fans returning from some European victory. “Don’t you remember?” I ask him again and again. “We got out of the train at Thurso, and walked down the hill into the town, and it was like swimming in a river of ecstatic shiny green.”
He can’t recall it. I am hurt, but then remind myself that in the time since we went to the north, he has gone on many other holidays, laid down many other memories, and this one poor trip, still so vivid in my mind, is buried deep in his, several layers down.
I have to try hard to remember this, when I talk to friends and relations whose lives have not stopped.
Frogs
A story slides unexpectedly out of the bookshelves of my memory and opens itself at the front of my mind. I cannot remember where I first heard it or when—perhaps in my childhood, for it has the shape of a fable or folktale.
Something about the circumstances of my life has caused it to be brought from the archives, where it has lurked for many years, undisturbed.
Two frogs hop into the cool of a dairy on a hot day. They perch on the rims of two churns of milk, wondering whether they might have a drink. Suddenly disaster strikes—they both lose their footing and fall in. The churns are too deep and the sides are too steep for them to be able to climb out.
First Frog swims around in circles for a while. But soon he says to himself, “What is the point of all this swimming? There is no way out. I may as well stop and let myself drown, because that is what will happen eventually, in any case.”
So he stops swimming, sinks to the bottom of the churn and drowns.
Meanwhile, Second Frog is swimming round in circles in the churn next door. “There does not appear to be any way out,” he says to himself, “but I’m not dead yet. I’ll just keep swimming round in circles as long as I can.”
So he swims and he swims. “Blimey this is tedious,” he thinks, as he passes a mark on the wall of the churn for the umpteenth time.
“I wonder how Bert is getting on,” he thinks after a while, and shouts, “Bert! Bert!”
There is no reply from the other churn. Second Frog feels sad and alone. But he keeps on swimming.
After a long time, he says to himself wearily, “Either this milk is getting thicker or my legs are growing tired.”
He keeps on swimming.
And then the milk gets very thick indeed, and Second Frog finds himself standing safely on a solid yellow surface. He hops easily out of the churn to freedom. His legs, flailing for so long, have churned the milk to butter.
The moral of the story is: Never give up.
I THINK A lot about Second Frog, as in my dark pool I struggle through the endless circling days.
Games to Play in the Dark 7: Crazy Daisy
A crazy daisy is a two-word phrase where both parts rhyme. You must also think up a “clue” for the phrase which will enable another person to guess it. The clue for “crazy daisy,” for example, might be “lunatic flower.”
It is not easy to come up with good crazy daisies, so even with three or four players, long pauses ensue, while everybody thinks furiously, and the heave and strain of mental machinery is practically audible.
So it is a good idea to think them up on your own, in the dark, and store them away in a pocket of your mind, for the delectation of visitors, when they come:
confused large bird
flustered bustard
mushroom-related mistake
fungal bungle
right-wing rumpus
Tory furore
ancient beverage
primordial cordial
It is always particularly satisfying when you find a rhyme for a word of unusual structure, which does not seem, at first, to be promising:
military action by small marsupial
wombat combat
Remission 2
The first thing is that I can spend a little longer out of my room. I can go from total blackness into the gloom downstairs—and stay there for a while.
The second thing is that while I am downstairs in the gloom, I can pull back one end of a long velvet curtain, and let in a feeble spindly shaft of day.
The third thing is as momentous as before. I put on my boots, my hat and coat and step into the dark garden. With great gasps, like a returning exile, I inhale the smell of the world, and walk for a while the perimeter of the lawn.
There is, once more, relief all round at the fourth thing, when I can start again to make the meals.
The fifth thing is just as risky as before, as I venture out among headlights and street lights in the night-time close.
The sixth thing involves a mirror and TV. The seventh, once again, relates to legwear. The eighth gives me, at last, a renewed glimpse of a non-dark world, painted in subtle shades of grey.
The Change
At first, every new thing is a delight. Each mundane task I add to my repertoire thrills me—no matter how tiny or trivial. “I cleaned the bathroom floor today,” I announce to Pete over dinner, glowing with happy pride. In the early stages of my climb back to the light, the contrast with my previous existence is so dazzling, the flame of hope rekindled so intense, that I bubble over with high spirits. I break into impromptu dances in the kitchen, seizing my startled lover and enforcing his participation. I sing random bits of songs, some generally known, others made up on the spur of the moment to suit the circumstances. My heart is filled with gratitude and relief—gratitude that I have been granted another chance; relief that my worst fear—the fear of permanence—has yet again been proved unfounded.
And then there is a change.
It is like setting out in a boat from a dark and hideous shore, and for the first part of the journey, you look only at the place that you have left, and watch the stretch of sea between the boat and the shore steadily grow bigger, and the land recede, and you rejoice.
And then you turn your head the other way. You face the direction of travel, and you realise that the other shore is so far away that you cannot see it, but can only believe that it is there, that all around you is a blank and lonely waste of water, and that storms and monsters lie ahead.
At a certain stage of recovery—a few weeks, say, after I have re-started my dusk walks—my spirits fail me. No longer powered by joy at what I have left behind, I see with cold detachment how far I have to go. My long and lonely days trapped in the house drag horribly; I am sick of always having to solicit visits and never going visiting; I yearn to see the inside of someone else’s house—anyone’s—out of sheer curiosity. A few months ago I was in ecstasy because I could leaf through a mail order catalogue. Now I am discontented because I cannot GO SHOPPING, and try on the goddamn boots before I have to buy. I long to make faster progress, to push my boundaries in all directions. But I know I am playing with fire.
I studied history at university. My mutinous discontent recalls something I read there on the subject of revolutions. They do not happen, it was argued, when the oppressed class is being maximally ground down by misery, but, rather, when conditions improve. It is the slight relief of pressure which gives the downtrodden the chance to lift their heads out of the slime, to look about them, and become cognisant of the true circumstances of their lives.
I try hard to count my blessings, to remind myself of the small victories I have won against the darkness, to jump upon the embers of desire.
ABC
I continue to correspond with my consultant. He is helpful in providing medical reports and letters required from time to time by some tentacle of bureaucracy, but, in terms of actual treatment, has nothing further to suggest. He would be delighted to see me if I could get to London for an appointment—but, frankly, if by my own efforts I got myself into a position where I was able to do that, I would be so delighted that I would probably carry on with whatever I had been trying, and use my new-found resilience to do something more interesting, instead.
So, like so many people who are chronically ill, I am released into the wild healthcare borderland, a trackless and confusing country, where what signposts there are point in multiple directions, sat navs fall silent, and strange beasts roam.
“Have you tried …?” people say to me. “And what about …?”
“Thank you for the thought,” I say. “I will put it on the list.”
Over the years I have tried so many things; an ABC is a more elegant method of summary than a tedious chronological account.
A IS FOR ACUPUNCTURE
“Er—I’m afraid I won’t be able to take my clothes off. Would you still be prepared to treat me?”
One acupuncturist is willing to give it a go. She comes to the house and sticks needles in my hands, forearms, feet, ankles and, through my leggings, my lower legs, while explaining that, of course, this limited approach is sub-optimal. I persist for eight sessions, but there is no discernible effect.
B IS FOR BREATHING
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