I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled
Whose garlands dead
And all but he departed.
Thomas Moore
London: the present
Life raft
I’m so tired, tired all the time. These nightmares keep hold of me, dragging along behind me through the day. They cast a pall over everything – everything. Like a black blanket, heavy and suffocating. My whole body feels on alert, on edge, waiting, waiting. I want a different kind of sleep – heavy, drugged, oblivion. I want to go back to the nothingness.
I find the nothingness sometimes still. I can find it momentarily, in drink, in sex, in focusing on a piece of work for hours on end – but then it all comes screaming back. Why? This never used to happen. What is happening to me? I used to be so good at keeping all these feelings away. There was no point in holding them – they were just too painful. I want to detach, detach, detach. I used to be able to…
Now I feel at war with myself.
I spoke with Claire about the need for crutches – skills that I had needed before, but which now seemed to be losing their power.
We had an exchange that stuck in my head long after the session ended. It cut something inside that was still bleeding.
“You fought hard for those skills, Eve, they helped you to survive. But they are a legacy of the past and they are not helping you now. Perhaps you don’t need them any more, in this reality. When they are controlling you, stopping you moving forward, that can only serve to reinforce any feelings of displacement and impotence.
“It sounds as if you are still in that war zone, that you never really got the chance to leave. That no help was available to welcome you into another place, another reality. So you’ve been left somewhere in the middle, a foot in either place, and no place to rest. A permanent limbo,” Claire told me.
“Yes,” I said. “I know that is true. And I so want to stop all this. But how are you meant to abandon ship without a life-raft to jump on to?”
“What about just diving into the sea? Nothing separating you from the world around you? Have you ever just gone diving into the sea?”
Had I ever just gone diving into the sea? Those words felt like a hot iron pressed against my skin. How could she know?
Dream
The flooded maze
I am outside, under the scorching sun. The heat and light are searing. Stunted white walls, coming up to my mid-thigh, carve off in every direction. They are not brick, but something more clinical, with cleaner lines – detached and somehow sinister. Gazing at the walls, I see that they form an infinite maze, with endless dead-ends, geometric patterns, swirls and small staircases, leading to…more of the same. There is no possible solution to this maze, but you must play the game nonetheless. I will wander through this maze endlessly. I know that.
Coming up to just below my knees is clear water. A flooded maze. Nowhere, except the tops of the walls, is dry land. You must constantly wade through the hopeless trap of watery paths, searching without hope.
My eye can travel for miles. I can feel the white light of the sun above, the heat on my shoulders. I am a prisoner here. I am a grown man, wearing a loin cloth, staring resolutely ahead at my challenge. I have been sent here to be punished, but there is no crime to my name. This punishment seems just – quietly expected. I am not broken. I am a gentle strength.
The white light is blinding, remorseless, knifing through me. I have no sense of panic, just a calm resolve to try, and a strange sense of dignity.
I am exposed. The brightness reveals me. My lack of clothing strips me down to the elemental glare. My prison could not be more infinite, expansive or glaringly white, yet there is a horror to it, a claustrophobic oppression of hopelessness. Nowhere to protect myself, nowhere to hide away, to regroup in a cool, dark place.
The water is cool, the sun warm on my shoulders. I am in no physical pain, distress or danger. But the prison for my mind is absolute. It is a masterstroke of cruelty and torture.
Complete, permanent isolation. Never meeting another person or animal, never seeing a growing thing. Withdrawal of permission to engage with the living world – separation and remoteness. Removal from normal life.
Everywhere is emptiness. Infinite, bright emptiness. Such sterility and nothingness – as if all the richness of life has been sucked out, to leave this vacuum of basics: water, air, light. It is terrifying. That such a trio of basics can be so horrifying is a surprise. But I feel resolved. Resolved to walk this maze, endlessly. I start to walk.
London: the present
The separation of lives
I often found myself standing on Marni’s doorstep after work. With my cousin I could let down some of the façade I had to wear all day, rest a while. While Peter, her little boy, slept, we would often sit and talk for hours – occasionally joined by Sebastien, her husband. Often there was something beautiful in the simplicity of our chat – it was about nothing and everything, relaxed and intimate, covering school places to issues at work. But today, I wanted to talk about something else – something personal.
“I’ve been seeing a psychoanalyst,” I mentioned, as I sat at her old oak kitchen table, running my fingers over its whorls and knots. Each ring here shows a phase of life, I thought, as I stroked it. I saw how Marni’s hand stilled momentarily as she filled the kettle under the running tap, allowing the water stream to hit the edge of the kettle and spray over the counter. She quickly readjusted and pushed the kettle fully under the stream of water.
“How long? Tea or coffee, Eves?” she managed to say, without effort, and without turning her head from the tap. I felt a burst of gratitude towards my cousin – always so easy to talk to, always so gentle in her approach.
“Tea, please.” I smiled at the back of Marni’s head. “Several months now. She’s really good. I think it’s been really good.”
I waited for her to finish making the tea, bring it to the table, and settle down, and beamed her a smile of thanks.
“So – good, huh?” Marni took it on.
I started to tell her about our recent discussions about the unconscious, about the parts of me that I had shut down. I wanted her take on it. I trusted her completely, and more than that, I really admired Marni’s mind. A fluid, imaginative mind, with great awareness of the human condition. Although her gifts were natural rather than taught, I felt confident she would quickly see the truths and realities behind the more academic discussions I’d been having with Claire.
“Do you think I hide too much of myself?” I asked, directly.
“I think you hide an awful lot of yourself, but I’m not the person to say if that is too much, Eves. I suppose the litmus test is how it works for you.”
“I thought it was working for me,” I said quietly. “But now I’m not so sure. I sometimes feel like a caged animal. Like I designed and made the cage, but now realise I never made a key – I don’t really know how you open it all up.”
* * *
Back at my own flat that night I thought back to that day, so many years ago, that I had first moved in with my aunt and uncle, and my cousin Marni. My aunt, Vi Lanner, was a well-meaning woman – she hadn’t hesitated to open up her home to me – but she had wordlessly insisted I leave all my ‘baggage’ at the door. Everything would be bought new. New clothes, new toys, new life. Least said, soonest mended, in Vi’s view. She was a firm believer in life forging on ahead as a remedy for all ills, and underlying that was an acute awareness that she was out of her depth with this one, and that what I needed above all else was to see her as a stable influence, not flailing about in the horror of what had just happened.
So that is what she presented to me, from that first night when Paul had collected me from the airport and brought me to their front d
oor. Vi had visibly quailed at the sight of the little scrap flickering on her threshold, dark smudges under her eyes, her wavy dark hair loose around her face, looking a lifetime older than her 11 years. But Vi had rallied herself, given out a breezy smile, and stepped back graciously to invite me to enter my new world.
I had sensed the landscape here rapidly, and had fallen into the line set out for me – no fuss, no deviations, full of gratitude. My cousin Marni, several years my senior, had been brought home from boarding school as a special dispensation, to allow me to find my way in this new environment, before I accompanied Marni back to school.
I didn’t have time at the start to have any feelings about the school – feelings were a luxury for those not in shock. I was too dislocated from the leaps between different worlds that had all happened in such a short space of time. Five months before I had been a different person, a different girl running around the garden with her brother and sister, a different daughter running up for one last hug from her mother as the bell rang for school, a different friend, called for after homework time to go out and play under the arching flame of the forest trees and jewel-like bougainvillea. Not only was she not there anymore, that ‘there’ no longer even existed, and sometimes I wondered whether I did – exist, that is. Who are we, really? What gives us form in the world? What holds us here? What is left when so many pieces have blown away?
Because I didn’t know the answers to any of those questions, I decided simply to blend in with my surroundings until I could find a better answer. At least that way, I had reasoned, there would be something left of me, something that would be pulled into the future, in case a way forward presented itself. I think I approached it rather like someone who cryogenically freezes a terminally ill spouse just before death, to have some tiny candle flickering in hope for a day when science may just provide a solution, a new reality.
So, I had ‘knuckled down’, studied hard, ‘done myself and my parents proud,’ ‘not allowed the tragedy to affect my life.’ And in earning those accolades, I tasted the ashes of that victory – the people saying those things to me really believed them. I had done it, pulled it off. I was now adept at working undercover.
Of course, there had been times when I had wished it were otherwise, wished it so hard that I thought my feelings themselves may somehow have the power to form things into being. There had been times, with Auntie Vi sat on the end of my bed, tucking me in at night, that I had wanted my aunt to reach out and take my hand, ask me to talk, ask me to let it all out, wanted her to be a safe pair of arms to fall apart in. I could almost see her fingers creeping across the flowers on my embroidered duvet cover, inching closer to mine, to gather me in – I could have sworn I saw those fingers start on that journey a few times, but then they faltered. With an abrupt change of pace, Auntie Vi would briskly announce it was time for bedtime prayers – with a fervour that suggested that she fundamentally believed they would ward off all the darkness in the night. That was one of the hardest parts I had to play. I resented that faith, resented the god that hadn’t saved anything I had loved from the darkness, that had allowed that shadow to sweep through my life, consuming all I knew in its suffocating blanket of ash. The words weren’t just meaningless to me, they enraged me: “deliver us from evil”.
Paul was different – a quiet, humble man, who had allowed his wife to dictate the terms and pace of their conjoined lives many decades ago. His attempts to soften some of her more graceless attempts at unrelenting cheerfulness were quickly quashed by a sharp look and a clear message that he was meddling in affairs he knew nothing about. He was a kindly, but distant uncle, both in terms of the time he spent cloistered in his study, and also in his emotional availability. I sensed that very early on in his marriage he had sought out the path of least resistance, resigning himself to a partnership built around the space for his wife’s firm beliefs and opinions, at the expense of any of his own. A garden can only contain so many plants, and some are simply too rampant and hardy to be competed with. So, from him, too, I learned that the lonely path can also be the easy path. Or was it the other way around? Either way, it was simply easier to move along under the radar.
Although it was Paul who was my blood relation – the elder brother of my father – he left the upbringing of his niece squarely in Vi’s camp. If that made me feel abandoned by him, I was never aware of it at the time. I had no feeling of belonging anywhere enough to have recognised an abandonment.
Marni was what I had lived for in those days; Marni, with her shock of red hair, her bold freckles and her warm heart. Marni, who, in those early days, hadn’t waited for me to ask to climb into her bed, but who had simply climbed in beside me herself, whenever she had sensed the need. Her love was patient, often silent, never probing, but it was there like a living thing, pulsing and glowing like a wonderful undercarriage to my teenage years. Marni was a happy person, not in the emotionally blinkered, desperately cheerful way of my aunt, but in a genuine, see-the-balance-in-everything sense. And because it was so genuine, it never grated on me. In fact, I positively delighted in it. Just as Marni could bump into me in the corridor at school, glowing about something that had happened to her that morning, so she could glow with pleasure for any of my own successes. And it was never done in a way that made me feel the pressure of living up to my billing, ‘not to allow the tragedy to affect my life’. No, it was done in such a sensitive way that I could feel that Marni fully understood what it may have cost me to get here, to do this, to win that.
Home: 25 years ago
Hiding
Eve shook as another bomb fell in the distance. It had been unrelenting for days and days now, and still it made her flinch every time. She looked around at the faces of her family; they all looked so much older, heavier.
Her parents kept everything going as best as they could, working hard to stay positive and cheerful, but Eve was old enough now to see the cracks – and to know in the pit of her stomach that they were just as scared as she was.
They were running low on food, but her parents still made family meals – with everyone sitting around the table as they had always done, trying to chat about the future, and what they would all do when this was over, when they were able to go out again, and breathe the air, and no longer feel like cockroaches trapped in the pipes.
“Just a few more days, I think. I really think so,” her father had said one mealtime. Eve’s mother nodded gently at them all, to lend credence to this fantasy, as she held Laila in her arms, trying to soothe her as the staccato noises invaded from outside.
Dream
Hanging
I was condemned to death with a group of friends – none of us knew what for. The terror of knowing I was to be killed consumed me. We were getting dressed to be taken to the hanging place by the guards. One of the guards commented that we shouldn’t be wearing our ‘good’ clothes. This callousness enraged me.
We were standing in a line now, all on stools, with nooses around our necks. I tightened mine as much as possible so that I would die quickly. I was waiting for the awful jerk that would break my neck.
But suddenly, I was just watching from the crowd, my friends still all lined up to be executed. My voice was gone, and I couldn’t move my body, couldn’t stop the killing. I had to stand and watch, with the rest of the crowd. I felt strangely sad that I wouldn’t experience that neck-breaking jolt. I had betrayed them.
The guilt. The overwhelming guilt. I couldn’t breathe.
We, the Drowned,
Hold our hollow hearted ground
Till we swallow ourselves down
Again, again.
Lisa Hannigan
London: the present
Bubble
“You coming, Eve?” John poked his head around my cubicle partition, hanging on with one arm. I didn’t like these partitions. His head looked ridiculous just hanging there like an expectant school
boy, and anyone could walk almost right up to you before you became aware of their presence. It was unnerving, especially when you were deeply involved in your work and not tuned into the world around you.
I stifled a jolt. “Umm – yes, I’m coming. I just need to get this written up. There’s not much left to do, but I’m going to comb though it once more. I’ll be along really soon.”
“Sure? OK. We’re setting off now then – the advance party.” John smiled, pleased with his pun, slapped the partition wall abruptly, twice, and then his head disappeared.
The noise level receded as my remaining colleagues headed off to the team drinks. It had been a tough year for the firm, with changes in legislation meaning fewer people sought out their services, so we had to make those cases we did have really count. Mistakes, slips, misses: all stood out more glaringly now. This had not been the year to start having trouble sleeping again.
I refocused, applying myself to the screen in front of me, and began to read through once again. It was a great brief; I knew that. Clear, concise, well-argued, well-structured. But I just needed to check again, check I hadn’t missed anything, hadn’t omitted something that could make all the difference. I had been missing so much recently.
Today was the anniversary of everything; the day the world had changed. I had worried a bit when the date for the team drinks came through, knowing I would rather not be there that night, just in case. But, it’s just a date, like any other – meaningless, really.
My reluctance to go now was just tiredness talking. I’d be fine. Closing the file on the case-notes, I knew I couldn’t postpone it much longer. I pushed myself up and wandered to the staff lounge, carefully altering my persona from work mode to semi-work mode. It was a subtle shift, but one I had perfected years ago.
There was a bite in the late afternoon air. The days were shortening, and most of the heat had been sucked away by the end of my workdays now. I walked briskly down the pavement, taking care to step around the obvious patches of forming ice. ‘It’s the black ice you need to watch out for,’ I heard my mother’s words suddenly in my head, from another age. ‘You never see it coming.’ I gasped from the sharp hit of pain I got from the memory, and hugged my arms tighter around myself.
The Shifting Pools Page 3