Girl in the Dark (24 page)

I wonder what self-help advice is given to those under sentence of death, as they await the outcome of their last appeals. Would an extreme proponent of positive
thinking recommend not even contemplating the possibility of failure in case this opens the door to the reality? I feel I have to give some time to mental trial runs, so that the shock, if it must come, will be less catastrophic, because I have already been through it, in my mind.

Eventually I receive an email saying that the communications manager has left the project, and that any contact should now be with the project director.

I engage with the project director. Sensibly, he asks if I can obtain a letter from my consultant about the white light problem, which I do. After several months I have a general reassurance from the project director that they won’t install street lights “in the immediate vicinity of my home” that will be “injurious to my health.”

I know from my previous life how slippery words can be. I know that what looks, on first reading, like a commitment, can actually, when it comes to the crunch, be nothing of the sort. It’s no reflection on the integrity of the individuals involved; they are simply part of a system addicted to wiggle room. But the net result of my ten years in Whitehall is I’m wary of anyone or anything official. So I’m concerned to get detailed specifics on the council’s plans, and in a form more formal than an email.

After another few months of phone calls and emails, I learn that the project director has left the project. I ask my local councillor again for help. After a few weeks, I am contacted by a senior engineer, who comes to visit me, with a map.

He says white fluorescent lighting is not suitable everywhere anyway, and he would like me to indicate where I walk on the map, so that a special area of sodium lamps can be installed (they still want to replace the lamps themselves), rather like a nature reserve for an exotic, endangered species. He can’t guarantee everything I ask for, but will aim for some of it.

At these signs of intelligence and humanity, I almost collapse with relief. I want to embrace this grey-haired, soft-spoken man, my low-key, geeky saviour.

I submit my annotated map, but then, for several months, hear nothing definite except that they are very busy sorting out the contract. I wonder if the sensible engineer has been overruled by some other, less amenable, part of the bureaucracy. I’m worried that I’m still relying on personal assurances from a project whose implementation dates are growing closer, and whose staff have a marked tendency to leave.

It’s two years since the consultation exercise. The long period of uncertainty, in tandem with the constant effort to overcome my natural instincts and keep hassling, has slowly drained me. I have read books on how to manage stress, have learned how to breathe through my feet, to breathe in for four and out for nine, to breathe so that my belly rises and falls, to meditate by focusing on the breath. But I still feel like crumpled paper. I decide it’s time to bring things to a head.

I email the local law firms, and pick the one which gives the sole intelligent response. A fierce and rigorous partner comes to see me, asks a lot of questions and takes
away a lot of papers. She drafts a letter which makes references to the Disability Discrimination Act, the Disability Equality Duty, and the Human Rights Act.

But in the end, the letter is not sent. I start putting the solicitor on the copy list of my emails and mention I have consulted one. A plan of my area arrives from the council. It shows the position, reference number and type of every street light. The streets and footpaths around my house are edged with a glorious golden glow. The accompanying email says, furthermore, that the rollout of new lamps in my neighbourhood will be scheduled at the end of the implementation period, so it won’t happen for a couple of years, at least.

I am dizzy with relief. I allow myself, even, some modest jubilation. But my past training still does not desert me. I put all the papers in a file, tell the solicitor to retain my set, and wait to see if promises will be kept.

During a long and hopeful period of remission in 2007, Pete and I decide to have another go at a wedding. With a light-sensitive bride, the whole event has to be reconfigured. We consult the sunset times in my diary and find that on 6 December the sun will set at 15:57. So we decide we will get married on that day, at four o’clock.

It is no longer feasible to hold the ceremony and reception in a hotel. I need to be able to control the amount and type of lighting in my environment, and to
retreat periodically to my lair. Pete investigates the registry office in town; it is a nightmare of ferocious strip lights and large plate glass windows.

But the church where we were going to have a blessing is still suitable. It is very old, and the village that once surrounded it moved in the Middle Ages because of plague. So it now stands in the middle of fields, with few surrounding lights. Inside, it is lit by a series of sodium spots, high up in the beams of the roof.

The church is one to which Pete has belonged for many years. When he first arrived in the area, he investigated the surrounding Church of England establishments to find one in which he would feel at home—in the expression used by those in the know, neither too low down nor too high up the candle. He eschewed the church nearest to his house, a barn of glass and yellow brick and fluorescent lighting, where the words of praise songs descend from the ceiling on screens and the congregation wave their arms unencumbered by hymn books.

My own religious background is more complex. My mother is Jewish (Reform rather than Orthodox); my father, originally a Scottish Presbyterian, passed through both Marxist and New Age phases before converting to Catholicism two years before his death. Growing up, I never felt fully immersed in either camp, and although occasionally I envied the coherent community life of my cousins, I also enjoyed being able to step back, observe from outside, and develop my own perspective. I had never envisaged having a church wedding, but the logic of our situation is becoming inescapable. If we want to
get married, it looks like we are going to have to do it in the church. It takes me a while to come to terms with this, but finally, I admit it to Pete. “But will they have me?” I wonder. We write to the vicar explaining the position, and I am pleased when I find out that the Church of England, as an established church, considers that it has the care of all souls within the land, including mine, and will marry me even though I am not a Christian. I am even allowed to omit “through Jesus Christ our Lord” when I say my vows. It is all most sensible and civilised.

I have a wedding dress. It is bluebell-blue satin, with embroidered flowers climbing up from the hem. But wearing the dress alone is not an option any more. The dressmaker sews a fitted jacket, in matching material, and well lined, for me to wear over the top.

I also need a hat. I decide to work on the principle that if one has to wear a hat to one’s own wedding, it might as well be a humdinger. I find in the Yellow Pages a character called “The Mad Hatter,” who is prepared to come to the house. Together we concoct a millinerial event—bluebell blue, with an enormous brim, and a vast silk flower.

It is a splendid creation. The only disadvantage, as Pete and I will discover on the day, is that the brim is so wide that it discourages intimacy. We can’t stand too close together for the wedding pictures, or the groom gets hit in the face.

The reception is to be reduced in size and relocated to the house. The house is not a large one, so we plan
to get extra floor space by hiring a marquee which will attach on to the back of the conservatory, and fill up nearly the whole garden. The guests will be kept warm by gas heaters and energetic Scottish dancing. There will be a bar in the bay window at the front end of the living room, and food set out on tables in the conservatory, for guests to help themselves.

Five weeks before the wedding I step on a snake.

It is a long one.

I have had months of slow but uninterrupted improvement. I have reached f22 on my light meter—meaning that I can go out about an hour before sunset, and stay out for the same time after dawn.

I have begun to teach the piano to local children, putting into practice, at last, what I learnt on my course. There seems to be a demand—soon I have eleven pupils, and am planning to hold an informal concert for parents and friends, to be followed by a tea party involving lots of cake.

The teaching is my undoing. My pupils come in the after-school slot, two or three most weekdays. I have been used to teaching the first two by natural daylight, and only putting the piano lamp on for the third.

At the end of October the clocks go back and the evenings become darker. I teach three pupils in succession under the glare of the piano lamp.

It is too much.

For the whole of the following night I feel as though cheese graters are being slowly pulled across my body. The next day, I can hardly leave my dark room.

T
WO WEEKS BEFORE
the wedding, my state has not shown much improvement. Pete and I debate what to do—to cancel the wedding for a second time, or to plough on regardless.

In the end we decide to carry on. Standing in the living room I make a statement to Pete, looking into his eyes, holding on to his elbows so that he cannot turn away. I tell him that if, subsequent to the wedding, my condition does not improve, I will understand if he decides to divorce me.

“OK,” he replies. “But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

We wrap our arms around each other and kiss for a long time.

This is my true wedding vow, my dark vow, the one that will, if I have to keep it, shred my heart. The promises I will make on the day are easy and obvious; with my dark vow I make obeisance to the forces that shift implacably within the black pit of life, that twist and break the finest, strongest things. In ninety-nine out of a hundred possible worlds, we are ideal companions; this may be the one in which we’re not.

The final two weeks pass in some sort of surrealist nightmare. I spend as much time as possible in the dark, trying to stabilise my skin, popping up to take delivery of my hat, try on my jacket, speak on the phone about the cake (I can hardly remember what it is supposed to look like). All sorts of things that I had once thought
important fall by the wayside. I am given a silly haircut by a visiting hairdresser, who refuses to come back and fix it; I can’t cope with the hassle of finding anybody else.

The day before the wedding, I sit upstairs in my room while a rumpus goes on underneath. Men charge in and out installing the marquee, demanding that bits be cut off various trees and shrubs so that it will fit. Friends arrive to help shift furniture. The flower lady turns up in a car full of greenery and blossoms, blue, pink and white, and starts installing her arrangements. Pete comes in to give me periodic reports and show me photographs of the more interesting developments. In between these, I listen to my talking book. It’s
Bravo Two Zero.

And it’s
Bravo Two Zero
the next day as well. I am glad, because the story of an SAS patrol stuck behind enemy lines in the first Gulf War is at least gripping and true. It helps me to forget that this is my wedding day, that it has not turned out as I had expected, that I do not know what will happen in the afternoon, when I put on my outfit and go to the church, whether I will be able to stand it, even with most of the lights off, how much pain there is to come.

During the morning of my wedding day, the narrator is captured by Iraqi soldiers. He is beaten up, taken for interrogation, beaten up, displayed to an angry mob, convinced he is about to be shot or torn to pieces, beaten up again.

Suddenly it’s three o’clock. I turn off the torture
scenes. Hurriedly, I put on my dress and jacket. I take several beta carotene tablets, which can sometimes take the edge off my reactions. In the unlit bathroom, peering into the mirror at my dim reflection, I hazard a small amount of make-up, and put on my hat. When I come downstairs, Pete opens the front door of the house and the back door of the car. A few desultory raindrops spatter the close from a mottled grey sky, but on the horizon, gaps in the cloud reveal pale primrose patches of light. I dash across the two-metre gap and dive inside my puppy cage, while trying to preserve the upstandingness of my silk flower.

“Right,” says Pete. “Are you in?”

I thrash about, fastening my seatbelt, and shifting the recalcitrant folds of felt so that they press less heavily on my head, but still provide protection around the legs and feet.

“I’m ready,” I say. “I hope it’s not going to pour down. Let’s go for it!”

He starts up the engine, and we move off into the uncertain December dusk.

I
N THE END
, adrenaline and absurdity get me through. My memories are an agglomeration of intense, mad, joyful fragments, like a web of fairy lights: walking up the aisle with Pete to “Wachet auf” by Bach; the weird lighting in the church, where most of the central lights are off, but the ones at the sides are on, and there are huge white candles at the altar, and smaller ones in stone niches and on windowsills; nearly fainting when
I come to say my vows, suddenly overwhelmed by the realisation that we’ve made it this far; at the party afterwards, whirling triumphantly up and down the marquee, flung from partner to partner, as we collectively work out, finally, how to “strip the willow”; my stepmother, on the waiting list for a hip operation, throwing aside her walking sticks and joining in; a young girl on the trampoline in the children’s corner, daughter of one of Pete’s colleagues, bouncing, bouncing, blonde hair flying; the sudden onset, halfway through, of anxiety about loo rolls (there are seventy people in the house), and Pam driving valiantly to Tesco to bring back an enormous multipack.