Girl in the Dark (5 page)

Pete comes to see me in London after the holiday. I am in a state, my face now definitely reacting to light. But the sensitivity seems to change at random, making it hard to establish how much I can tolerate, and how bright. Sometimes the curtains need to stay shut, sometimes it is OK to go for a walk towards evening, occasionally I make it to the shops, at other times any of these activities causes horrible burning that lasts for hours. So many places, I am discovering, have fluorescent lighting—buses, trains, supermarkets, the GP’s surgery, which I visit to be signed off work. I have taken to wearing my straw hat and a long cotton scarf round my neck that I can hold up over the lower part of my face. It mitigates, but does not remove, the pain of exposure.

I know that it would be good for me to leave smelly London, and stop trying to cope on my own. I do not know what is happening to my relationship with Pete; most likely it is crumbling—everything else in my life seems to be coming to an end. But I haven’t got time for niceties and subtleties, the way one is supposed to negotiate with a boyfriend of two years. A ferocious drive for self-preservation has grown up within me, and it has eaten most of my pride.

We sit in the small kitchen at the back of my first-floor flat. Cool drinks stand on the pine table, and outside summer rages, in a riot of dayglo blue and green.

I take his hand across the corner of the table. There is one particular possibility that I have to eliminate or confirm. “I’m going to ask you something,” I say, “and please don’t worry about saying no. I will absolutely understand.”

“OK,” he says. “What is it?”

The words wait behind my lips, I feel them push against my teeth. How strange, I think, suddenly detached, that mere vibrations released into air can change the course of lives.

I take a breath and let the words fly free. “Can I come and stay with you for a while?” I look past his head, at the kitchen shelves with their piles of plates and bowls. “I’m sorry to have to ask.”

He says nothing. For I am asking, of course, for more than house room. I am asking him to help me interact with the outside world, and to burden himself with a girlfriend who is rapidly becoming a freak.

“Can I think about it?” he says.

“Of course you can.” I squeeze his hand. “Now, what shall we do about dinner?” I get up from the table, and find my legs are shaking and can hardly bear my weight.

Later that night, I can’t sleep. I turn over in my mind what the other options might be if he says no, focusing on ruthlessly practical thoughts. I try to anaesthetise myself to the true implications of what I have done—that
if he says no, it means that everything is over, and I face the future alone.

We make inconsequential small talk over breakfast. I try to divine from his manner what is going on in his mind, but what words lurk behind his lips I cannot tell.

Eventually he says, “I’ve thought about what you asked. I must say I didn’t sleep much last night. Anyway, I’ve decided yes.”

Relief crashes over me in a huge clean wave. “Thank you,” I say, jumping up to hug him.

“I think we should have a trial period,” he continues, “just to see how it goes. Say two months?”

In my guts, I feel a clutch of dismay. So then—not completely overwhelmed with delight. But I should have expected something of this sort. Pete is organised, orderly and circumspect, in contrast to my more spontaneous nature. We complement each other—it is why things have worked well.

So I hug him again, and force away my misgivings, and say, “Yes, that’s a sensible idea. Who knows? A few weeks in the same house and we might both go barking mad.”

“Woof,” he says, and kisses my neck.

I
F WE COULD
only see the future.

Reacting on my face is bad, but surely hats, scarves and avoidance will be the limit of my limitations? We have no inkling of the strange reversal that awaits us, that within a year, relieving my face will transfer the
problem, intensified, to the rest of me, and immure me, helpless, in the dark.

We will look back, then, to this time as to a golden age, and if we ever could rerun this day, knowing what will come, I am quite sure he would not take me in, and as for me, I know that I would never dare to ask.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

In the dark you have only the materials of voice, mind and memory, and the mind’s eye, powerful or wavering depending on how you are feeling. So the games you play in the dark use words. And the words are little sparks in the darkness, because they make something flash up in your consciousness, as on a computer screen. Each one is a tiny stimulus, a mental pinprick; one of those jolts of electricity that keep you alive.

This is a game to play on your own, at night, when you can’t sleep. It disciplines the mind, requiring the kind of concentration that excludes all other thoughts.

Think of two words with the same number of letters.

In your mind, change one into the other by changing one letter at a time. Every new combination of letters must also make a word.

Sometimes you will find you have gone up a blind alley and must retrace your steps to try a different route. Sometimes you will find you have gone round a long and complicated diversion when a short cut existed all the time.

BLACK can become WHITE. BODY can become SOUL. DEATH … LIVES.

And my tour de force, the only six-letter transformation I ever achieved. One hot, airless, enclosed summer night, I turned BUTTER into CHEESE.

In my darkness, I feel full of beans. I could run for miles across open country, dance the whole night through, turn cartwheels over sea-scrubbed sand. My brain is unfogged, my mind is clear. Life and energy crackle in my limbs, my neural networks hum.

I am the prisoner only of my skin—would I could claw that traitorous membrane from my bones.

The darkness can sense the anomaly at its core; that lump of energised matter, throbbing against the clutch
of its confinement, as though a tin can contained a beating heart.

But the darkness has its own quiet wisdom. Slowly, subtly, it will moderate that futile energy; it has methods for restoring equilibrium.

Eyes close when there is nothing for them to see; it is a natural response. When eyes are closed, alertness dims, thoughts turn inward, breathing slows. The body relaxes, it questions the need to be vertical, it longs to measure its length on the bed or the floor. After all, that is where, in darkness, a body feels most secure, least likely to become disorientated, to tangle with the furniture, or bash extremities against the wall.

In my sealed-up room, the darkness whispers to my body with a thousand gentle tongues. “Rest,” it says, passing soft fingers over my eyelids, pulling me downwards with insistent hands. It has a thousand gentle mouths to press against my flesh, and suck, so tenderly, my energy away.

I often succumb. It feels so easy and so natural, to give in to that wise, compassionate caress. But I know I should resist. I do not want to waste away, my muscles slackened, my bones honeycombed, my heart no longer used to pumping blood beyond the horizontal. I know the risks that come with inactivity, and that for me, any hospitalisation would be a searing agony, under the glare of fluorescent lights and the incomprehension of medical staff. I do not know what prolonged exposure to strong light would do to me now; it is quite possible that the reaction would prove fatal. I do not want to find out.

So I know that I must MOVE. Luckily, in the life before, I was a seeker after bodily truths. Low back pain, the result of falling off a bus, troubled me; in the end I found relief in Pilates and the Alexander technique.

Now I work on my core strength in the darkness. I pull in my lower abdominals after engaging my pelvic floor. I lie on my back with one knee bent and push the opposite heel vertically upwards, feeling my hamstring judder as it takes the unexpected strain. I exercise my quads by grasping one knee to my chest and extending the other leg horizontally to hover just above the carpet. I strengthen my shoulder girdle by performing the Plank, and practise Mexican waves with my toes. At other times I lie in the semi-supine position, knees bent, with my head on a couple of books, directing my back to lengthen and widen, and my knees to go forward and away.

I sit in the dark and listen to the storm. I hear the bitter clatter of rain against my walls, and the low boom of the wind, a strange unsettling frequency that makes bones in my skull vibrate.

A fiercer skirl of wind alters the rhythm of the rain. It rattles harder and faster against the walls, splats on to the windowpanes. The drip-drip-drip of an overflowing gutter starts up, then a second drip, out of kilter with the first. Unknown objects crash and roll in the street outside. A gate, ripped from its fastening, bangs
back and forth, a maddening irregular handclap. The house itself is filled with cross-currents of air, which twitch along the frames of windows and suck at closed doors. The house shifts its weight around me, as if it were about to get to its feet and dance.

My ears exult in the glorious accumulating noise, my blood foams with the energy of the storm. The world outside is trying to reach me, roused from its usual indifference. It drags its claws along the bars of my cage. It puts its mouth to my walls, and roars.

My body has learnt to sit quietly in my room. It has learnt not to scream or sob or writhe. But my spirit swirls like the wind, surges like the rain. The wildness outside calls to the wildness within.

“I hear you,” I cry out, in my mind. “I’m here, keep going, don’t stop.”

When the weather is filthy, it is natural to stay snug indoors. While the storm lasts, I have the illusion of normality. I can pretend I am inside my walls by choice, that I am merely waiting until the sky has cleared, and when it does I will walk out of the door and down the street, and breathe in the smell of soaked earth, and kick the toes of my boots through puddles, and watch droplets glide from shimmering leaves.

Slowly the rain loses its power, and the wind blows itself out. The house settles down around me and the cross-currents of air are stilled. Only the drip-drip of a gutter taps out a small coda to the vanished symphony; soon even that comes to an end.

I have ears—why don’t I listen to music?

And I have music, too: my CDs and tapes, brought with me from London, some lined up on the bottom shelf of the bureau within touching distance of where I sit, some mixed in with Pete’s in a cabinet downstairs.

It is an eclectic collection. Brought up classical, I had a penchant for monumental choral and orchestral works—the complete Mahler symphonies, Beethoven’s
Missa Solemnis,
the Bach B Minor Mass. I also liked chamber music that unites piano and strings in friendly combination, such as the “Archduke Trio” and the “Trout Quintet”—mellower and less austere than string quartets, or pianists on their own. As I grew older and left home, I acquired other favourites, each one introduced to me by a particular person at a particular time; taken together, a coded history of my previous life. There are albums by Pulp and the Waterboys, the Cowboy Junkies, ABBA and the Rolling Stones. There is even some AC/DC.

And inside my little radio, just a finger’s push away, lurk endless unpredicted streams, in which you never know when your ears will come across something compelling, unexpected and new.

I have tried. But somehow, music listened to in solitary darkness becomes devastating in its power. Undiluted by other stimuli, it overwhelms the emotional centres of my brain so quickly, so completely, that only
a few bars are necessary to dissolve my careful stoicism into wild tears.

This is the effect of all music, any music, music I have loved, music I have never heard before. The curls and twists of melody, the simplest alternation of chords, are probing fingers in my mind, pulling the lids off memories, tearing the shrouds from impossible yearnings, beaming floodlights on to departed joys. Music unhinges me, reduces to howling chaos my prudent tidying of emotion, my management of agony.

I do not wish to writhe on the floor of my room in paroxysms of weeping. It is pointless and unaesthetic, makes me hot and bothered, doesn’t help my skin. So I forgo the liquid pleasures of music, which serve only to flood me with things I have lost, and choose instead the dry pebbles of words.