Eating the Underworld (18 page)

Rachel was in the crowded foyer of a theatre when she noticed someone buying a packet of sandwiches.

Without warning, she was suddenly back in the experience of hospital. In bed, watching the arrival of the thrice-daily meal trays, their contents concealed by metal domes, rising as singularly as pulp fiction moonscapes from the dun-coloured plastic.

Hospital food, she thought, was like airline food—magical in its packaging and arrival out of thin air. It came from a place where there were no kitchens in sight, no fry-pans, no fires, no spices; no connection to the real world outside, where bread was baked and soups simmered on stove-tops. It appeared suddenly, without warning, created whole, in the way that wishes materialised in the old stories. It was created in some underground cavern by the servants of the genie. It was a sign of the strange new world you had entered.

One of the things that Rachel remembered afterwards was the experience of waking in hospital. What she remembered was that she couldn't remember it. It was different from waking at home where consciousness came with a slow seeping through of awareness, like the soft, wet colours in a watercolour. It was different from waking after surgery in the recovery room, where you awoke torn by the drag and pull of two different tides—the drugged world of the unconscious behind you and the hard world of reality in front.

In hospital, each morning, Rachel would simply
be awake
. She had been asleep before and she was awake now. It was seamless; there was no sense of actually waking. She had tried many times to recall the experience of transition, but it was impossible. She could not. It reminded Rachel of science fiction stories where people walked through a doorway in one world straight through into the next. The barrier between the two worlds was magic. It existed to separate two worlds which could not co-exist. One was here and one was there. And there was no in-between. It was as simple as that.

That was what it had been like in the enchanted mansion where Beauty lived. With one step, she had passed through the gate and into a different universe, into the house of the Beast, her lover, whose true face she had never seen. In this house too, meals appeared without preparation. The work of the house was done by invisible hands. A few servants might be seen here or there, going about their business; but to say that these were the forces which vitalised the house was as misleading as to say that clocks, with their little cogs and fidget wheels, controlled time.

Beauty's father had met the terrifying, shambling Beast while on his travels. In return for a favour, the Beast had demanded the first thing the father saw on his return home. The father had agreed. That first thing had been Beauty as she ran to greet him.

And so, Beauty had been given up to the monster. Her father had made a bargain—inadvertently, unavoidably perhaps—but he had made a bargain with a monster. And what the monster wanted was his daughter.

Trembling, Beauty had been spirited away to a great, distant mansion. She had come in fear. The Master of the house was horrifying in his appearance; bestial, frightening. If she had been able to run, she would have run. But she had to stay; she had entered another world.

All through the early days of terror, she had to stay. Through the fear for her life, her physical safety, her sanity—she had to stay. Day by day, she stayed. And as she stayed, something began to happen. Through something she could not name, or even understand, she began to be embraced by love.

And there it should have ended. And would have, but for the outside world. Beauty wanted to go home. Just for a visit, she insisted. Her family would be worrying about her. She wanted to reassure them, share her new-found joy.

How easy it was to remember what never really was. How could you remember your old home, for instance, as filled with anything other than happiness and smiles? How could you remember that your beloved father gave you away? And not knowing how changed you were, how could you know that you could never go home again?

That was what Beauty didn't know. The Beast had said she could stay away for seven days; any longer and he would die. Her two sisters saw her happiness and raged with envy, persuading Beauty to stay past the magical seventh day. She did so. Almost too late, she realised that she loved the Beast and that her delay had nearly cost him his life.

Everyone wanted to go home, thought Rachel, and a shiver suddenly rippled down her back. She had just remembered the fairytale she had always wanted to forget.

It was ‘The King of the Golden Mountain'; the only fairy story she had been frightened by. The oven in ‘Hansel and Gretel' had not frightened her, nor had the poisoned apple nor the wolf in the woods. But something about ‘The King of the Golden Mountain' had left her terrified. So terrified that she could not even remember it properly.

She had been left instead with a series of odd images: a wild, raging man; magical transportations; and a sense of foreboding and loss that closed around her like a thick feather cloak. She had gone back to read it again in the intervening years, with the same result: an inability to remember it and the lingering sense of being alone in a landscape of desolation and emptiness.

The story rested in her bookshelf, in an old thumbed-through copy of the
Collected Grimm's Fairytales
. This morning she had read it again for the third time.

It was about a father who had lost all his money and met a black dwarf who promised to remedy his plight. In return, the dwarf wanted the first thing that rubbed against the merchant's leg when he returned home. Thinking that it would be his dog, the merchant agreed. It was his son,
however, who ran out to welcome him home.

As a way of evading the dwarf, the son was cast out into the river where he floated downstream to an unknown country. Here he found a magical palace, where a Princess had been bespelled into the form of a snake, coiling and writhing on the floor. She had waited twelve years for him.

To break the enchantment, the son had to submit to twelve black men who would visit him at night to beat, torment and pierce him with instruments. He was to stand silently, to endure, to make no response. On the second night, another twelve men would come to do the same dark work and on the third night, there would be twenty-four and they would cut off his head.

But their powers would cease at midnight, at the first moment of the new day; at Cinderella time, when all things were transformed, even though it was dark, even though there was not yet the knowledge of the light.

If he remained stoic through this—steady, enduring without uttering a word—then the Princess would be freed from the spell. She would sprinkle him with a flask containing the Water of Life, and he would be alive and well and as whole as before.

He agreed. He did it all. It was a bargain. He understood his part in it, understood his reward. Happiness in recompense for sacrifice.

And so he broke the spell. The snake became the beautiful Princess, who returned with him to her kingdom of the Golden Mountain. There was joy and jubilation. Their marriage was celebrated with dancing and feasting and he became the King of the Golden Mountain.

But after a while, it was the same old story—the hero wanting to go back, to visit the country, the father, the life he had come from; to say, ‘It's me. I'm back.' To be welcomed into their arms. To reclaim them. And to reclaim himself.

He was warned of course—as they are always warned—that it was dangerous. That the past is a marshy territory, never what it seems to be; that the pathways are mischievous; that what you have lost is never what you find.

Through all the months of chemotherapy, Rachel focused on reclaiming herself. In the shower, her hair came off in soft and strangely frightening clumps as if it had no anchor. Nothing whatsoever kept it where it was supposed to be, where it had always been. Her hair said more clearly than anything else that Rachel's world had come unhinged; that her own personal physics had cut loose and were headed for parts unknown.

Rachel reacted by cutting off her hair so that all that framed her face was a shadow; then later, nothing. Her friends said it suited her, said she should keep it short. Rachel acquiesced shyly. But beneath it all, she realised afterwards, what she had always been thinking was, ‘It will come back, it will grow again.' She had gone through the whole experience thinking that she would come back. That she would come out the other end of the tunnel and meet herself, Rachel, smiling in the sunshine.

The King of the Golden Mountain went back. The Snake Princess had grudgingly given him the magic ring that would transport him there. But on one condition: that he
must never use it to wish her away to his old home.

He agreed. In his nagging, blinkered need to go back home, he would have agreed to anything. And perhaps he meant it at the time.

He went back to his old world; his home, family, friends. But they didn't recognise him. They turned him away, denied him. He had no existence in this old world. He was dead in it, just as surely as he had been alive in the new one.

He was distraught. He broke all his promises. He sent for the Snake Princess, who came against her will, furious at being called. She disowned him too. He was doubly disowned now. He belonged neither in this world nor the other. He was alone now, stranded, desperate for his new home, for the strange palace of the King of the Golden Mountain.

Despairing and penniless, bereft of the ring that carried his magic, he met three giants, squabbling over an inheritance. He stole it away from them—a magical sword which cut off heads, a cloak of invisibility and boots which would transport the wearer instantly to wherever he wished to go. He knew where he wished to go.

He arrived at the palace of the King of the Golden Mountain on the eve of a great celebration. The Snake Princess was marrying again. He had on his cloak of invisibility. He passed by the guards, the guests, the Snake Princess. No-one saw him. He passed by like mist.

After her chemotherapy, Rachel had expected the world to be wonderful. After wrestling with the dark angel—although Rachel had always felt it was more like dancing; a strange, whirling dance where you had to concentrate
on the steps—she had imagined she could rest. Her hair would grow. Her body would become strong again. The old Rachel would bloom.

Instead, it seemed that all of the usual or unusual troubles and trials that space themselves out in a life had gathered in clusters to attend Rachel that year. They came, one after another in groups and larger groups. Rachel, who was used to picking herself up, picked herself up—although more and more wearily. She went back to her old fairy stories and read them over. No-one had told her about this. And neither did the stories.

Rachel was used to being optimistic. It was not a facile optimism, it was hard-won. She had seen darkness before. But in some way that she knew could never be fully understood with language, Rachel had always reclaimed the light, reclaimed herself, reclaimed hope. But in this year after chemotherapy, for the first time since adulthood, she could feel it fading.

Rachel had read somewhere that when the body is deprived of food, it begins to cannibalise itself. When the soul is deprived of hope, does the same thing happen?

The King of the Golden Mountain was enraged. The guests were feasting, his pain meant nothing to them. The Snake Princess was supping at her wedding feast, laughing and happy; he did not exist for her.

The King made himself visible; roared out his betrayal. He took the magical sword he had stolen and ordered it to cut off the heads of all the people he had once loved and cherished. He ended up standing alone in his castle, once more and never as he had imagined it, the King of the Golden Mountain.

Rachel finished reading the story in the light of her bedside lamp. She had taken the book to bed. That was what fairytales were after all: bedtime stories to hold you through the dark. But not this one. Rachel could see why she had always been frightened of this story. It was the most terrifying story of all. It was the one without the happy ending, the one about the loss of hope.

Rachel had thought that she had done all that she was supposed to do. She had befriended the chemotherapy; she had kissed the Beast. The transformation was supposed to happen. She saw now that it had been too easy. The chemotherapy had been ugly, but it was on her side, just as the Beast had been for Beauty. What she had not embraced was the loss. Just as Beauty and the King of the Golden Mountain had wanted to go back, so had she.

But how could you embrace loss? It was like embracing absence—the unknown, the darkness. It was the letting go of all that was old and past. And how could you trust in letting go, when what you might find was a vacuum?

Rachel turned off the light. The past did not exist, she saw now. If you went back to the past, you would not exist.

Rachel lay in the dark. She had read books that talked of being transformed by the light. But Rachel understood now that that was wrong. Light was not what transformed you. Transformations took place in the dark—like Jonah in his whale; like Daniel in the lion's den.

She thought of the King of the Golden Mountain on the third night of his test. She imagined him in pieces on the
ground, waiting for the first minute after midnight. She could feel the changed interior of her body with its dark, mysterious caverns. She remembered lying in the narrow bed in hospital, the alchemist's palace, feeling the chemicals drip in; trusting blindly in her body, in her ability to take them in, to make them part of herself, a part of her wholeness.

She had betrayed that trust now, she realised. In the months of disappointment, in the losses, in the loss of hope, she had failed to see the real task. The real task, she now saw, was to wait in the darkness—without clocks, without signs, without indications of light. The real task was to wait in the darkness and, not knowing whether it would ever happen, trust in the first minute after midnight.