Girl in the Dark (10 page)

While the soup cooks, we go upstairs into the black to talk and play games.

After lunch my mother sits down at the piano, and the noise and movement, the bumps and crashes and exclamations, simply fall away, as if a live electric cable has, by connecting to the keyboard, earthed itself; she plays with lucid musical intelligence, serenity and joy. The music comes up through the floor of my dark room, filling it with rippling sound. With human company attached, I can listen, and not be overwhelmed.

When I was growing up, our weekly piano lesson periodically descended into sulking and rage as I tried to master some new aspect of technique. For a while, there was an enterprise known as the “Family Newspaper,” written by all family members on large blank sheets of newsprint with felt-tip pens. “Anna is still struggling with the scale of F major,” my mother reported in one of her news columns. I was indignant. An entry appeared in the next edition in irregular purple letters: “Mummy is still struggling with the Brahms—Handel variations,” it read, referring to a large and virtuoso concert piece.

In my mother I see the source of parts of myself, and also elements so alien that they leave me mystified. Yet my mother is the person to whom I say things about my situation that I say to no one else.

She tells me that another of my cousins has had a baby.

“What is that to me?” I ask. “I don’t want to know things that remind me that I am a failure.”

She tells me of an acquaintance who has been rushed to hospital, because he was coughing up blood.

“At least he can go to hospital,” I say.

My mother says she has spoken to her friend Eleanor,
who has had psychiatric problems for years, and now lives alone, depressed, and hardly ever goes out.

“Can she see the sky outside her window?” I ask. “Can she open her front door and walk along her street? Can she turn on the telly whenever she wants to and watch it for as long as she likes? Then she should bow down and kiss the ground in gratitude.”

“I have tried to tell her about you,” says my mother.

I would not speak like this to Pete or to my friends, and do so to my mother only rarely. Told of others’ joys or misfortunes, I usually respond with friendly interest or appropriate concern. If there is a small dark movement of the heart, it is suppressed, and I find I soon feel, sincerely, what I am saying.

But with my mother I become a child again. “It’s not fair,” I yell, in more sophisticated language, and my desperate, incontinent jealousy floods out, hot and foul and unconstrained.

What will I do, what will I do, when the time comes, that must inevitably come, and my feisty, bustling mother is dead?

This is a game for two players. It requires a high degree of logic, concentration and memory, providing an aerobics class for the neural networks.

Each player thinks of a four-letter word, of the polite kind. They take it in turns to attempt to guess each
other’s word. For every word they ask, the other player gives them a score from 0 to 3 representing the number of letters in the correct positions.

The first to guess the other’s word correctly wins.

You have to remember your word. You have to remember the words you’ve asked. You have to remember the scores you got for them.

Then you apply logic, probability and low cunning to run the other person’s word to earth before your own cover is blown. Between two experienced players the game has the beauty and ruthlessness of single combat.

I dream of four-letter words. I search my mind for the most difficult and unusual, listen for them as I absorb my talking books. I fall in love with words like ECRU and HYMN and GNAW; with AWRY, with CHIC and with BULB. I start a small mental stash of the most fiendish in preparation for future competitions with my mother, who is my most frequent and fearsome opponent. My mother is notorious among her friends and relations for being extremely able and competitive at all sorts of games. I can beat her, but I need all my wits about me, and when I manage it, my mother, desensitised to victory, will exclaim, “You always win!”

One day, a game goes like this:

What has happened, of course, is that we have given each other the same word HIGH, and, both being devilishly clever and devious, have avoided asking words with Is and Hs in the relevant places, in order not to give the other person ideas.

Finally, finally, somebody says FISH, and gets two points. The Mexican stand-off is over and, very quickly, all is revealed.

Other people visit me, from time to time. Mostly they are people I am sure of, people who will see the girl through the darkness, who will not be fazed by the strangeness of the situation, not be so shocked and flabbergasted that they become distressing companions.

A person called Alicia comes, but only once. “I don’t
know how you cope, I couldn’t,” she says, almost accusingly, over and over again. I wonder what I am expected to do: to scream the whole day long, perhaps, or run down the street in the midday sun in some futile show of defiance and then burn for weeks. Or does my visitor mean, but cannot bring herself to say, that in her view this is a life not worth living, that I should end it, and not embarrass people by dragging my pitiful scrap of existence on through the months and the years?

But for the most part, people—of the right kind—are good. For them I put on my corset of cheerfulness, a solid serviceable garment. It holds in the bulgings and oozings of emotion, and soon I find they are, temporarily, stilled.

People make me tidy up my psyche, as one might order the magazines on the coffee table before a visitor arrives, and afterwards, for a while, they will stay that way, before entropy reasserts its hold.

People remind me of my true shape, the particular bent of my mind, the curve of my wit; that I have substance, though I move wraithlike among shadows, that the years before the darkness laid down rich sediment which has not been washed away.

But there are not enough people. In fairness, I have not made it easy, for them or for myself. Moving to Itchingford from London when I did, I placed geographical, economic and psychological barriers between us, as well as the more subtle ones of divergence of experience, of loss of common ground. To visit me without a car, they must take one or two trains, at least, and then, from the railway station, a twenty-minute cab ride, or
a highly circuitous bus. The ones who visit with a car must drive along the M25 and down the M3, length of journey variable, depending on the traffic. In Itchingford itself, the time between my coming and the second disaster has not been long enough, and I have not been well enough, to make new friends, at least of the degree of intimacy required to invite comfortably into tragedy.

Pete, with his own friends, sticks to generalities about our situation, and is vague about the particulars. Constitutionally self-contained and reticent on private matters, he does not, in any context, easily ask for help.

Alex comes to visit, the person for whom I arranged “Little Donkey” in happier times. She says, “I think you’re amazing, you cope so well. You are such a strong woman.”

That is the sort of thing I like, being only human, after all.

Jonathan, my once-close friend, does not come. He recovers, at least partially, from the bombing, and gets a high-powered job near his home on the far side of the capital, to which he can commute by car. “I must come and visit you,” he says, once or twice. It does not happen; soon phone calls also cease.

He was the person, more than any other, with whom I shared my London life. For eight years we would meet after work to go to a play in Shaftesbury Avenue, a concert at the Southbank, or a film at the NFT—all within walking distance of our office—or we would have a meal at our favourite Turkish restaurant, where I would
eat too many olives and too much hummus, and give myself indigestion.

Friendship plants itself as a small unobtrusive seed; over time, it grows thick roots that wrap around your heart. When a love affair ends, the tree is torn out quickly, the operation painful but clean. Friendship withers quietly, there is always hope of revival. Only after time has passed do you recognise that it is dead, and you are left, for years afterwards, pulling dry brown fibres from your chest.

M
Y VISITORS CAN
never find the door. They lose their sense of direction completely, and try to get out of the wardrobe, or through the mirror. “Hold still a minute,” I say, to stop them blundering about and banging into things. I move quickly, place my hand unerringly on the door handle, and release my confused visitor, who has been fluttering like a bird.

I am always trying to think of new things to do in the dark. Hungry for stuff to stuff the empty black hours, my mind ploughs up and down the fields of my experience, turning over the soil of all I’ve ever done, in case some nugget should rise to the surface, and could be put to use.

I have a memory of doing something with my hands,
something repetitious yet satisfying; something I had to look at to start with to get right, but that after a while I could carry on subconsciously. I remember twisting wool around two needle points, slipping one downwards just enough, allowing one loop to slide over the other, to catch and hold.

I was never good at crafty things when young, being neither meticulous nor neat, but I was definitely better at knitting than anything else. I had even, over two years, painstakingly completed a stripy jumper. Large, bulky and indubitably home-made, it came to a sad end in a charity shop; over the period of its making, I had become an excruciatingly self-conscious sixteen-year-old, and could not bring myself to wear it.

However, I remember the grim satisfaction of generating row after row; there was always visible reward for application in terms of inches produced, clear woolly proof of virtue.

Could this perhaps be just the thing to justify my useless life? I mention my idea to my friend Pam, who is an enthusiastic producer of garments for nephews and nieces. She turns up with a pair of large needles and a bag of thick bright turquoise wool, and gives me a refresher course in the gloom downstairs, nipping into the light of the kitchen to demonstrate the finer points.

The plan is that I am going to knit a scarf, straight up and down, no complicated shaping, in knit two, purl two rib.

I sit on the floor of my room, cross-legged, leaning my back against the side of the bed. To start with I think I can tell the difference between a stitch that has been
knitted in the previous row, and therefore wants to be purled (to maintain the ribbed effect), and a stitch that has been purled, and therefore wants to be knitted—partly by feel, and partly by keeping rigorous count in my head. My first few inches, taken downstairs to be examined, have worked well.

But gradually I get more and more confused. I become convinced that a particular sensation of woollen loops under my fingers means I must knit the next stitch rather than purl it, and I proceed for a few rows on that assumption. Then the texture starts to feel different, and I lose my nerve, and try another policy. I count my stitches—but then I find I have an odd and not an even number.

Something has gone very wrong.

I leave my darkness and examine what I have produced. For a band measuring about a couple of inches, the neat ribbed stripes have gone haywire, all bobbly and uneven, as though affected by some lichenous growth.