Girl in the Dark (16 page)

My grandmother, who was fifty-eight, begged my mother to kill her, over and over again, until she could no longer form the words. My mother told me she was tempted to do it, but then she thought about me; she did not want me to grow up with a mother in prison. Eventually my grandmother was admitted to hospital, and the staff put her bed near an open window. As they had hoped, she caught pneumonia and finally, in that slow suffocation, passed away.

The experience made my mother a powerful advocate of voluntary euthanasia. She became a member of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, which later became Dignity in Dying. Occasionally she would speak about what happened to the media; she also completed an advance directive relating to herself specifying the circumstances in which she would not wish further medical treatment. At the core of her argument was the sacredness of personal choice: facing the same set of terminal circumstances, each individual will choose differently; some may want to continue to their last breath, others may want to take an earlier exit. What is more, what a person believes they will want in such a situation may well change when they are actually in it; the individual who has spoken for years about a swift resort, should they reach a particular state of decrepitude, to a bottle
of whisky and a packet of pills, may well end up dying slowly and naturally, having found that they value every last second of consciousness, even if only to observe the flickering lights on a hospital ceiling. Conversely, a person formerly convinced they could never desire to end their life could, as their guts rot and their sphincters fail, find their perspective altered. The point is that it is never for a person outside the situation to judge.

So I should not be shocked to hear my mother articulate a principle so deeply held. Or perhaps she is simply calling my bluff, suspecting that my intention is not really settled or serious, and that this is the best way to get me to snap out of it.

But the person, of course, who has to listen to my statement most often is Pete, although I do my best to keep it in. He takes a dim view of suicide. “It is against the rules,” he says gruffly, “and ought to be against the law. It is extremely unfair on the people who are left behind.” And if I continue to bleat on, “Don’t do that, darling, I’d miss you.”

Then, one day, I am put into the receiver’s position. I have to respond to the statement myself. I am on the phone to one of my telephone friends, chronically ill, homeless and having a particularly bad time, and he says, “I don’t know if I can carry on. I’m thinking seriously about suicide.”

I do not hesitate. “I know what you mean,” I say, “I think about it too. But really, you shouldn’t. It would be letting the side down.” I listen with surprise to the bracing quality of my own advice—but I find that this is really what I feel: that there is a duty of solidarity among
all us impossible, near-invisible people; a duty, out of sheer cussedness, not to disappear completely, simply to ease the conscience of the rest.

And then I find myself telling my friend how years ago, in the life before, I went to Bristol to visit a girl I knew from university who was studying there to become a doctor. She took me to see the famous Clifton Suspension Bridge, a vertiginous feat of Victorian engineering spanning the deep gorge of the River Avon. As we walked on to it she pointed over the side, remarking ghoulishly, “That’s where people jump off.”

My stomach rolled as I looked down at a bare patch in the lush grass of the riverbank; it must have been a drop of several hundred feet. She went on: “Did you know, the suicide rate in parts of Bristol on a direct bus route to the bridge is much higher than the rate in places where you have to change?”

“Goodness,” I said, finding this very amusing, full of the blithe contempt of youth. “People can’t want to kill themselves that much, if they get put off because they have to change buses.”

But that is, of course, the point. It is an impulse that may well not be sustained, if the person is given the opportunity to reflect. Other statistics bear this out: the fall in paracetamol overdoses, for example, when the pills were no longer available loose, in large bottles, instead having to be prised individually from smaller blister packs.

It cannot be common for statistics to save lives, but both I and my friend seem comforted by these.

This is a game to play on your own, when talking books have palled, when you have no visitors in prospect, when boredom eats your brain.

You will need a large bound notebook and a pencil. A bound notebook so that your pages are disciplined and do not become entangled. A pencil, because a pen could run out and in the dark you will not be able to tell.

Pick up your pencil and open your notebook.

Place the thumb of your non-writing hand on the page beneath the start of the first line.

Your thumb will act as a marker, so that there will be space between each line and the next.

Write.

Write what?

Write what you know. Isn’t that what they say?

What you know is the darkness.

And as you begin to form words on the page, the darkness around you
moves.
It starts to gather, to circle, to form a vortex round the end of your pencil, and then—down the pencil’s black centre it pours.

It is unstoppable. It flows faster and faster, funnelling down that slim conductive wand, erupting on to the page, staining its purity with straggling struggling words.

And in your mind, a light goes on.

There is no longer a road between me and my dreams. My dreams do not disappear—they float somewhere high up and off to the side, in a warm bright bubble untethered from the earth. To reach them from the here and now is inconceivable; there is no connecting path.

If I dare to look into the future, my own mind censors me, dropping a heavy black curtain across the pathway of the first tentative thought. My mind is kind—it has become wise in the ways of self-protection. It knows that to permit contemplation of the future is the fastest way to dissolution and despair. For what can lurk beyond that curtain? Only three things: improvement, deterioration or continuance, and two of these three, if they were to be known for certain, could not be borne. They are sustainable, in fact, only through ignorance.

It is a blessing to live on the cutting edge of time, with all that is before us hidden. Stop your ears to psychics, gypsies and angels; banish any who might claim to lift that veil. Orpheus rescuing his love from Hades glanced behind him as he climbed the upward slope, and all was lost. I get through my days by walking backwards; for me, the fatal thing would be to risk a forward look.

The first signs are infinitesimal, almost imperceptible.

I come out of my room on one of my usual brief forays. I walk carefully down the stairs, thread my way through the gloom of the living room, surface in the kitchen, move swiftly to wash myself an apple and make a cup of green tea. I go back into the living room, sit down as usual at the dining table, bite into the cool sharp flesh of the apple, let the steam from the tea warm my nose. My eyes wander over the shapes in the murky room—some pale-coloured flowers in a vase, the spines of books on a bookshelf making a giant barcode of vertical lines. I chew on my apple, sip at my tea, and my thoughts drift.

And slowly, slowly I become aware that something that should, by now, be happening—is not happening. The ominous muttering in my skin that I have become conditioned to expect, since those first perplexing days at my computer so many months ago—it is not there.

I can scarcely believe it. I can scarcely allow myself to believe it. I slowly get up from the table. I have to put a hand to the wall to steady myself as my mind whirls. What should I do? How should I best use this extraordinary and incredible period of grace? In the end I decide that I should take exercise. I move some furniture out of the way, and in my quiet skin and rustling skirts, I pace up and down the living room, as if it were the long gallery of an Elizabethan country house, and I a lady stretching my legs on an inclement afternoon.

Then, after a while, the familiar prickling and tingling starts up, and I withdraw.

Back in my darkness I try to forget what has happened. It feels absurdly dangerous to let it linger in the mind—a spark set too close to huge silent receptacles containing that most flammable of substances, quiescent hope.

But the next day, the same thing happens again. I can go from total blackness into the gloom downstairs—and stay there for a while. There is an interval of silence during which my skin remains quiet, before the ominous murmuring starts up again, and I must once more be prudent, and withdraw.

And that is the first thing.

Days pass.

The second thing is that, while I am downstairs in the gloom, I can pull back one end of one long velvet curtain, and let in a feeble spindly shaft of day.

If I sit in a particular place, not too near the window and not too far away, and hold a magazine up close to my face, twisting my body round at an angle so that
light falls directly on the page at which I peer, the words are legible to me. I get a pain in my spine and a crick in my neck, but the tickle of text against my optic nerve is a sensuous pleasure, a long-forgotten caress.

I sit and read the magazine.

Days pass.

I stay downstairs a little longer. I pull back the curtain a little further.

Then comes the third thing. It is momentous.

One evening, after dark, I put on my boots, hat and coat, and open the back door of the house. I step out on to stone flags in a small enclosed space. The wall of next door’s kitchen is to my right, the wall of my own to my left, behind me the back wall of the garage, with a white-painted door.

But above me, a rectangle of clouded autumn sky, and before me, a path between bushes, drawing me on.

The smell of the world enfolds me. I grab great snorting gasps of the succulent night air, as though I am suddenly surfacing after being presumed drowned. I walk out on to the lawn, my legs shaking slightly, unused to such extended forward motion after so long a period of interior creeping. I move round and round the perimeter of the garden, relishing the unaccustomed swing of my legs, the roll of my feet, the movement of air against the skin of my face.

I could happily circle the lawn all night. But a street light lurks beyond the back fence—I must carefully measure my pleasure. After a few turns, I go back into the house. All the next day, I long for the evening, when I can try it again.

A few days later, I go out into the garden for my night-time walk, and find that rain is falling.

From the crown of my hat to the toes of my boots, an indescribable thrill runs through me. I stand poised at the edge of the lawn, and my starved senses open to this delicious, half-forgotten joy. Behind me the rain roars like a waterfall from the leaky gutter to the flat conservatory roof; it gurgles down the downpipes to the drains. I let it cover me. I let myself be soaked. Like a young plant, I let myself be watered well in. It is as though I am being kissed by the world, welcomed back to life.

On the other side of the little valley that runs behind our back fence is a chorus line of tall trees; I watch them as they wave their arms gracefully in time with the wind. In the garden itself, erratic branches from the dark-leaved cherry, a twisted wild-haired specimen, like a giant unkempt head, thrust frantically at odd angles. The feathery spire of the corner cypress splits and reforms, dusting the clouded, street-lamp-tinged sky.

My cap is weighing on my head, the hair underneath it hanging in rats’ tails. Rain has found an opening at the back of my neck and insinuates itself inside, inching down my vertebrae in a cool, stealthy stream. Drops mottle the lenses of my spectacles and set the skin on my face tingling; I tilt my head upwards to catch more. Unintentionally I breathe rain into my nostrils and gasp; yet the water, though surprising, feels mild
and sweet inside my tubes, different from memories of inhaling swimming pools and the sea.

I start to circle the lawn. A skin of surface water slaps beneath my soles. The lower part of my long silk skirt grows wetter and wetter, winding itself round my shins, catching under my feet, pulling ever more heavily on its elastic waistband as it slides inexorably over my hips. I hoick the garment back upwards, but the folds of silk are so swamped that each time it soon recommences its descent. I am put in mind of the heroines of nineteenth-century novels, and reflect on how inconvenient it must have been to stride about the countryside swathed in long skirts.

Eventually the irritation starts to detract from the intensity of the experience, and I go back indoors. “I’ve been relating to the rain,” I say to Pete, breathless and exhilarated, as I stand in the kitchen with water pouring off me, like a dog that has emerged from a pond.

“Yes, I can see that, darling,” he replies, as puddles form on the linoleum. “Personally, I’ve been staying indoors.”