A Fool, Free

by Beate Grimsrud

  When you sit in front of a doctor, the very situation means that one of you is below and the other is above. I fear no one. I look up to no one. But he sits there and is untouchable in some way. I always have one of my mental health workers with me, but the doctor is the authority in the room. Olof tries to persuade me to have the injection. Draws a head and a brain and a curve and tries to explain how it works. Even Jonathan, who gives the impression that he believes more in therapy than medicine, agrees with the doctor when he’s in the room. Elsa and Ingemar try to convince me. Mats, whom I run with and who thinks exercise is better than any pills, has not shared his views with the doctor. When it comes to medication, they stand united, with Manne at the helm.

  ‘Have you looked at what we agreed to about nights?’ Jonathan asks. ‘No.’ ‘Have a look in the folder now then. We’ve talked about sleep routines, but it appears that you’ve simply dropped them.’

  I’ve only stuck to one point in the list of all the things I shouldn’t do, and that is not to drink coffee. I drink Coke or hot milk and honey instead. Last night I felt that I couldn’t cope with living at home. The whole year has been an endless battle. I can’t do it. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes,’ I say, quietly.

  ‘What are the voices saying?’ Jonathan asks, on the ball. ‘That it’s not working. That I can’t live at home.’ ‘Of course you can live at home.’ ‘Maybe it’s just small defeats in the face of great progress,’ I say. ‘That’s more like it,’ Jonathan says. ‘Time you gave yourself a pat on the shoulder. And the real question is if you would do any better anywhere else. What’s that saying? Wherever you go, there you are.’ ‘Yes, I get that. But having someone to talk to at night wouldn’t be a bad thing.’ ‘You should sleep at night, not talk.’

  ‘Sometimes I wake up in the morning and can’t remember what I’ve done during the night, and the bed is full of bits of melted chocolate. It says in the agreement that I shouldn’t eat chocolate at night. But I have to treat myself. The other night I spent a hundred kronor on sweets.’ ‘That agreement was the dream scenario,’ Jonathan says. ‘We’ll just have to start again. Tibetan monks can sleep in the middle of a Manhattan rush hour, but I don’t think we’re there quite yet.’

  ‘I get so frightened and restless when I can’t sleep, or wake up after only a few hours. I think that there’s people in the flat, or I feel terribly lonely and adrift in space, with no connection, no links anywhere, and I think that I’ll never be able to sleep again.’

  ‘If you absolutely must speak to someone and there’s no answer at the unit, you could perhaps try the Internet,’ Jonathan suggests. ‘There are lots of places in the world where it’s day in our night.’ ‘I’ve never in my life chatted,’ I reply. ‘You have to think that you’re the world champion in sleeping. You can sleep. You have slept. We know that. You have to make friends with your insomnia and accept that sometimes you can’t sleep. Sometimes you blame your disorder for problems that belong to the healthy you, to life. Problems that we all share with you. Like not being able to sleep. Like being lonely. Half the problem is worrying about being worried.’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘Every night I think that I’m going to sleep. The opposite is a surprise.’ ‘You’ll have to start training yourself not to listen to the voices before you go to sleep. You’ll have to find a way to make them agree. They have to sleep as well. At night, they’re not allowed to feed you with compulsive thoughts and violent fantasies. You have to practise saying no. Instead you should have positive daydreams. Active daydreams. I dream about a South Sea island,’ he says. ‘What kind of grapes I’m growing, what the weather’s like, who my lover is.’

  ‘I don’t indulge in dreams like that,’ I interrupt. ‘You don’t need daydreams when you’re an author. Maybe because you’re at one with your imagination. I imagine all day. I feel and experience all the time when I’m writing. But I find it hard to imagine love and sex.’

  ‘And often it’s hard to imagine the things you find hard to do. Your thoughts are sent out like signals. It shows when you’re thinking about love. Look at me,’ he says, suddenly. ‘You’re looking down too much today. Daydreams don’t need to be realistic. It’s just nice to enjoy them. I’m not going to move to a South Sea island.’ He laughs.

  ‘I go to bed around nine-thirty, ten, because I don’t know what else to do with myself.’ ‘And are you tired then?’ ‘No, I feel that I have to get away from the evening. If I wake up after only a few hours, I wake up in the illness. If I wake having slept all night, I wake up in wellness.’

  ‘It’s important to shorten the time that you’re up. Say that it’s just a little break, and that you’ll soon be asleep again.’ Our hour has become an hour and a quarter. Jonathan gets up, he has to go elsewhere. ‘What about asking Lolo to record herself reading something calming, so that you can listen to it at night?’ I think that’s a good idea. ‘You need to connect quickly to reality again. Reality is security, rest and sleep. I know that you can do it,’ he says in the doorway.

  I’m cat-sitting for Harald and we both jump out of bed. Kajsa gets some tuna and I make coffee and three pieces of toast with marmalade. My body is strangely awake, it must have been a deep sleep. Have great confidence in today, that it’s okay to be alive. I’m going to get to my workspace early today. I’m going to write. It’s dark outside, as it’s winter. I light a candle. Am curious about how early I’ve woken up and go into the living room to check the wall clock. It’s half past one. Half past one? That’s far too early to have breakfast and coffee. I fell asleep around midnight.

  And what has Jonathan said about starting up the brain? It’s going at full speed now. I’ve told it it’s morning.

  Play calming music. Get into bed and think nice thoughts, so that sleep will come like the postman. I would rather train than sleep, though I know that muscles grow when you rest. That’s what Kiril taught me. Kajsa has wolfed down the tuna. She sneaks back into the bedroom and lies down on the window sill over the radiator where Kiril used to lie. I follow her, sit down on the bed. Kajsa has already fallen asleep. Cats don’t have insomnia.

  It’s more than five years now since Kiril disappeared. I’m too allergic to get another cat, and away too much. Or should I do it all the same? When the film about Kiril is finished. But I don’t want a new cat. I just want Kiril.

  Suddenly, I start to cry. It’s Espen who’s crying. Emil says that Espen is a crybaby. I dry our tears on the duvet cover. Look at the cat on the window sill. She’s an outdoor cat, so she gets mildly depressed when she’s with me and is forced to stay indoors. ‘How are you?’ I ask. ‘You can see that she’s sleeping,’ Erik replies. ‘You know you shouldn’t trust your mental health workers and the people who think they’re helping you. You know they’re lying. That they’re trying to trick you. That they make you ill. The Trilafon injections make you ill. Refuse to take the injections.’

  ‘Let’s not discuss that now,’ I say. ‘I just asked Kajsa how she was. I’d thought of saying to her that if she sees the flat as a cage, then she just needs to change her attitude. Life comes from inside and there are people who have lived rich lives in smaller spaces than this.’

  ‘The unit is a cage,’ Erik says. ‘No one can think sharp thoughts there.’ But he’s wrong, I’ve written several novels.

  I see a fox that’s been run over on the road near the bus stop at the cottage. It’s completely flat. Its innards have been pressed out of its mouth and lie in a red pool beside it. I remember Uppsala and the taxi driver all those years ago. A latent image that has waited for me to see the real thing. When I get back into town and am about to go down into the metro, a dead pigeon comes up on the escalator. I stop. Am I really going to go down onto the platform? I’ll jump in front of a train. I step onto the escalator, but immediately regret it and start to go back up at twice the speed. I have to save myself.

  I’ve been forced to save myself for as long as I can remember. Take myself home in the middle of the night.

  Elsa helps to ti
dy the bedroom. It’s not going to be a dangerous place any more. I open a childhood drawer and find a page from a magazine. Under the heading ‘Women to Women’ there’s a letter I wrote when I was thirteen. I read it to Elsa:

  I’m scared that I will never be a real person!

  I’m scared that I won’t get a proper education and grow up to be a real adult. Terrified by the thought that I’ll end up an alcoholic, drug addict or maybe a criminal. Did any of you who are grown up today ever go off the rails when you were young? I realise now that it was stupid to start drinking. It’s even worse that I wanted revenge after a bad day and started shoplifting. You’ll all be thinking that I come from a broken family or a dysfunctional home. But it’s not true. My parents are kind and nice and they think that I’m open and honest with them. To me it feels more like a new age of defiance and I think my parents are stupid and old-fashioned. I’ve tried to talk to my mum about beer and things like that, but she just dismisses it and doesn’t believe that of me. I’m glad my children don’t do stupid things like that, she says. So it’s not easy to make any real contact. I think school is desperately tedious. I’m not alone in that and I wonder why it has that effect on us. Don’t know that working life is a bed of roses either. But still think that adults are happier and more satisfied than we are, as teenagers. I’ve not got anything to complain about really. When you’ve got a freezer full of food, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, then you’re better off than 75 per cent of the world’s population. So why do I have this unbearable pain inside? I have to be honest and admit there have been times when I’ve felt so desperate that I’ve wanted to end my life. I’ve got lots of friends at school and at home. We hear about the future all the time, how overpopulated the planet is, that we have to expect a population explosion, that we will be drowning in rubbish and pollution in a few years’ time. The next minute we’re told that the Soviet Union is coming to get us, that Norway will soon be as middle-class and riddled with inequality as the USA. And the Christians, they scream that Jesus will soon come again and wipe out all non-believers in one go. There’s so much speculation, so much is written and said, it’s not surprising that teenagers feel insecure and wonder what’s the meaning of it all. I’ve tried to be Christian, but it didn’t work. Hope that my letter reaches others who feel the same, or grown-ups, preferably Christians, who have felt like I do now. From thirteen.

  ‘That was a cry for help from the young Eli,’ Elsa says. ‘You had a lively intellect and if you don’t feel secure, then it’s not easy to make sense of your life. It’s both mature and vulnerable. You just want someone to reach out and give that girl some warmth.’ I look at Elsa. ‘You do,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know why I wrote that I wanted an answer from Christians. Maybe God was messing with my heart,’ I say. Elsa sits down on the bed. We’ve just thrown out all the diaries that I’ve kept for the past twenty years. Who will want to read about when I went to training and when I was in hospital and who I met? Now no one will know. Now it’s all in the bin. ‘Does he still mess with your heart?’ Elsa asks. ‘Not very often.’

  ‘Did you get any answers to your cry for help?’ ‘Heaps, mostly from young Christians telling me that salvation was the only alternative. I struggled through the letters, but didn’t reply to any.’

  I pull down the note that says ‘Don’t sit on the sidelines of life’ on it, and the whole programme. They’re a blight on my kitchen cupboard doors. I want it to look nice. ‘Write nicer notes then,’ Jonathan suggests. ‘I don’t need them any longer.’ ‘But you have to start up the evening when you get home from work. Switch on the lights, turn on the radio. Make food. Make it normal. Don’t go to bed and listen to music. Phone someone. Can’t you start with your scrapbooks again?’ He’s referring to the art film synopses that I made. But they came to nothing because I got ill. Maybe I could start again. Maybe.

  I’ve got better at not going to bed. At staying up with life at home. But right now I’m finishing off the film about Kiril. The one that no one thought would ever be finished now looks like it will be a moving and poetic film about life, when things don’t go as planned. It’s about how grief recalls other sorrows. Even Dad is in it, who died the year before Kiril disappeared. I filmed our conversations to the very end. I tried to remind him about his life, which he found so hard to remember. We talked about death. It’s included in the film. I close the conversation by saying: ‘We’re not going to die now. We’re going to go out and look at the flowers.’ He replies: ‘To be or not to be.’ That is the last thing he says to me. I force him out in his wheelchair.

  Lolo has asked me to write down every evening five good things that have happened during the day. I’ve got the book on my bedside table. I write: Lolo, Lolo, Lolo, Lolo, Lolo. Simply because she exists. She came this afternoon and made supper, and packed lunches from the leftovers. She’s staying the night. She’s said that if I wake up at night, I should only make five small and five big movements. Turning over is a big movement. Getting up is not allowed. I can’t do it.

  We read a children’s book written by a colleague to each other. The Fox Book. On the first day of school, Freddy Fox gets a shock: there are only dogs in his class. We laugh. As you can imagine, he was bullied and teased. Who hasn’t felt like Freddy Fox, surrounded by lots of dogs with masters, collars and a pack mentality? With Lolo in the bed beside me, I think that we’re like a small pack. Or a couple of draught horses, who will never let go of one another.

  I tell Jonathan that I’ve noticed a change in the last few months. The unruly Erik has slowly started to withdraw. I don’t as often experience the uncontrollable anger moods he provokes. When there’s no end to destruction. His demands that everything be smashed, crushed, splintered. His orders to punch, break and fall to pieces are rarer and rarer. I have struggled to make him disappear, in the same way that he fought to appear a long time ago.

  ‘You’ve worked him out of your system. Maturity and good work, that’s what I’d call it.’ ‘It’s Prince Eugen who’s taken charge now.’ Jonathan leans back. He seems happy and swaps his old snus for some new. ‘He just sets different traps,’ I say. ‘Like what?’ ‘Guess!’ ‘Relentless shopping?’ We laugh. Expensive, but better suited to a wheel that’s turning and life in the world. The elegant prince and I, a middle-aged woman, hand in hand. The woman boy. It’s we who go out shopping.

  Jonathan gets up. I think he’s about to leave. Then he says: ‘Do you know when we met for the first time?’ I can’t remember. He sits down again. ‘I was new in the unit and saw you wandering restlessly around in the corridor. I tried to get your attention, and we talked for a bit, and I thought: this woman is not well. Then you interrupted the conversation and said that you had to go to a press conference because you’d been nominated for the August Prize. I thought to myself that life is made up of many dreams. And refused to let you out. Another member of staff had to come between us and say that you were allowed to leave the corridor with the locked door. If that had been today, I would have believed that you had hidden depths, but it didn’t shine through a year ago.’

  I walk around in my flat, in the unit, in my workspace, and the solution is always on the other side of the wall. I haven’t got a chance. How can I get to it? Do all these conversations matter? I want to be completely well.

  ‘You haven’t looked on the other side of the wall,’ Emil says, and laughs scornfully. ‘But I’m looking all the time.’ ‘You haven’t looked on the other side of the wall. No matter how you twist and turn, sanity and the answer are where you can’t reach them. You are forbidden to go there,’ he carries on. ‘If you found a way out, we might disappear. Injections don’t help against us. You wonder why, and there’s no answer. If you found a way out through the wall, there would be another wall and the answer would be behind that.’

  ‘I still intend to go there,’ I say. ‘I write, and you don’t.’

  It’s New Year’s Eve. I’ve been invite
d to dinner at Kristin’s in Oslo. For the starter, we have lobster soup, with large pieces of lobster in it. The main course is tuna and for dessert, lots of delicious cheese. There are two couples at the table. Two men and two women, and me.

  I float up and look down on us from above. We’re as many men as women. Three and three. I can be divided. Eli, both. They each get half from me. No one needs to feel threatened. I am the androgyne and fit in everywhere. Or don’t really fit in anywhere.

  We raise our glasses of champagne. Soon it will be a new year. At midnight, we’re going to send Chinese lanterns up into the night over the rooftops. Each one of us writes a wish on the thin, tissue-paper frame. I write, so that all the others can see, ‘I want to change sex’. I don’t write clearly. I don’t write from which to what. It will be a surprise. Even for me.

  I put on one of Prince Eugen’s suits and look at myself in the mirror. I look like Eli, but am not her any more. I’m not Prince Eugen either, the prince who after much consideration and opposition went to Paris in 1887 to study art. He was determined to be an artist, contrary to all conventions. And he became a successful painter.

  I look at myself from every angle. Who am I? What is visible and what is hidden? I’m older. The shirt is a little tight over the tummy of my body that used to be so slim. Women are better at driving, worse at cycling, better at everyday cooking, worse at playing chess, better at simultaneous interpretation, worse at getting pay rises, better managers. Worse at parking cars. None of these generalities apply to me. None of these generalities should apply to anyone. Female writers. Female people.