In a Strange Room (12 page)

 

 

H
e goes to London, but the same restlessness comes over him there, and he goes on somewhere else. And somewhere else again. Five months later he finds himself in a strange country, at the edge of a strange town, with dusk coming down. He is watching people drifting into a funfair on the other side of an overgrown expanse of ground. Circus music carries towards him faintly over the weeds and in the gathering gloom at the base of a high green volcano he sees the lights of a ferris wheel go round and round and round.

 

He doesn't know why, but this scene is like a mirror in which he sees himself. Not his face, or his past, but who he is. He feels a melancholy as soft and colourless as wind, and for the first time since he started travelling he thinks that he would like to stop. Stay in one place, never move again.

 

 

 

 

 

E
ight months after he passed through he is in London again, on his way back home. He is only here for a week, after which he will fly to Amsterdam and then, five days later, to South Africa.

 

He phones Jerome from a booth in the street. He doesn't know exactly why he's making this call, except that he promised he would, and he's unsure of whether to go back to visit them again. Before he can even mention the idea Jerome has put it to him, come, come, please. This time, even through the thin vein of the telephone line, he can hear the urgency of the invitation.

 

I have to think, he says, I have no money.

 

My family, it's okay, no money.

 

Also no time. I have only four days before I go. Maybe, all right, I'll see. I'll phone you from Amsterdam.

 

But before he gets to Amsterdam he has already made up his mind not to go. It's true that he has little money and time, but these are not the reasons for his decision. The memory of the last visit is still strong in his mind, he has carried it with him all the way on his travels, and he fears that the same thing will happen again. He will arrive, he will be made very welcome, he will spend a day or two in placidity and comfort, but the silence and distance between them, which they have incubated somehow since the first day they met in Africa, will amplify and grow, even as they become nicer to each other. This isn't what he wants, it is very deeply what he doesn't want, although it has taken this short conversation on the telephone for him to realize how unhappy that first visit made him.

 

So he goes down to Paris instead and stumbles aimlessly around the streets, wandering into shops and out again, sitting on benches. He's aware that he's engaged again in that most squalid of activities, using up time, but the journey hasn't ended where he wanted it to, it has frayed out instead into endless ambiguities and nuances, like a path that divides and divides endlessly, growing fainter all the time.

 

There are moments, it's true, in those three or four days, when a longing to go back to Switzerland comes over him like a pang, it's only a few hours on the train, he could do it on a whim, but then he remembers how he came back this way last time, emptiness weighing him down like a black suitcase chained to his wrist.

 

When he passes a public telephone now and then he remembers that he promised to call, but he can't do it yet, not yet. There would be a discussion again on the line, the push and pull of their broken attempts to communicate, and he might give in, in spite of himself.

 

So he leaves it to what is the very last moment, when he is at the airport in Amsterdam, with his bag checked in, waiting to board. There are crowds of people under the fluorescent lights, clutching packets from the duty-free shops, and outside, through the plate glass windows, the weird unnatural shapes of aircraft in rows. He makes the call from a bank of public phones, jostled from either side by elbows and foreign syllables. He hopes that Jerome won't be home.

 

Catherine answers the phone and recognizes his voice before he's said his name. Hello, are you coming back to visit us.

 

No, I'm sorry, I can't. I'm at the airport right now.

 

Ahh. She sounds disappointed. What a pity, we were hoping, Jerome was hoping.

 

I know, I'm sorry about it. He starts to babble the excuses about money and time, but his tongue is tripping him up. Another time, he says, and now he means it, there will be another time to make this right.

 

Another time, she agrees, do you want to talk to Jerome, and though his money is fast running out he knows he must.

 

There is a brief conversation in the background before Jerome comes on, in his voice he knows already. Ah, but why.

 

No money, he says again, no time.

 

Come. Come.

 

It's too late. I'm at the airport. I'll make it up to you, he says, I promise. Another time.

 

Yes, I want. Travelling. Next year.

 

Where.

 

I don't know. Africa. Possibly.

 

That will be wonderful, he says. It sounds as if he's been invited, although the words, as always, haven't been said. Jerome, I have to go. The money.

 

I don't understand.

 

And then the phone goes dead. He hangs up slowly, wondering whether to ring again, but he's said what he has to say, and anyway he has to leave. Another time.

 

 

 

F
riends who live in London have bought a house in the country three hours from Cape Town, and when I was passing through they offered the use of this place to stay in. If you think you would like it, it's going to be standing empty, it would be nice to have somebody keeping an eye.

 

He said he would think about it but the next day, just before leaving London, he phoned to accept. It felt in some way like a providential offer. He has no other place to return to, and he knows he can't go back to the way he was living before, the endless moving around, the rootlessness. So the idea of this house, far away from all the old familiar sites, is like a fresh beginning, the possibility of home.

 

The move isn't easy, he has to take all his things out of storage and hire vans to load everything up and conscript friends to help him drive. The house, when he gets there, is like nowhere he's ever lived before. It's rustic and rough, with a thatched roof and concrete floors and a windmill turning outside the bedroom window. His friends help him unload and then drive back to Cape Town almost immediately, leaving him alone amongst the piles and piles of boxes.

 

That first night he sits on the back step, looking out across a back yard choked with weeds to the occasional lights of trucks on the single road that passes the town. He watches the moon come up over the stony tops of the valley and gets gently drunk on sherry and wonders what he's done to himself now.

 

But over the next few days, as he sweeps and cleans and unpacks the boxes and puts his possessions into place, he starts to feel better about where he is. It doesn't belong to him, but he lives here, he doesn't need to leave unless he wants to. And as the shapes of the rooms and the noises of the roof become familiar, a sort of intimacy develops between him and the place, they put out tendrils and grow into each other. This process deepens as his life overflows outdoors, he starts pulling up the weeds in the garden, he digs furrows and lets water run to the fruit trees and the rose-bushes, and when old dead branches begin to sprout buds and leaves, and then bright bursts of colour, he feels as if it's happening inside himself.

 

By then the little town and even the landscape around it are also connected to him, there is no interruption between him and the world, he isn't separate any more from what he sees. When he goes out the front door now it isn't to catch a bus, or to find another hotel, he walks into the mountains and then he comes back home again. Home. Sometimes he stops on whatever dirt road he's followed today and looks back down the valley to the town, and then he always picks out the tiny roof under which he will be sleeping tonight.

 

He doesn't feel like a traveller any more, it's hard to imagine that he ever thought of himself that way, and when he finally settles himself to write a letter to Jerome it's like a stranger willing up the words. He tells about where he is and what it's like to be here, and says that he hopes Jerome will come to visit him one day.

 

A week after he sends the letter an envelope arrives from Switzerland. He doesn't recognize the handwriting, but the stamp is clearly visible, and it's with a sense of excitement that he sits down to read. When he opens the envelope his own letter falls out, like a piece of the past returned to his hands. The single stiff card that accompanies it says, Dear Sir, I'm very sorry to break the death of Jerome to you. He died on the 26th of November in an accident of motorbike. His mother asked me to send you your letter back. The signature at the bottom is that of a stranger, and even as he sits at the epicentre of this soundless white explosion, that separate watchful part of his brain is back again, reading over his shoulder, trying to decipher the name, aware of all the oddities of language, working out when it happened. One week to the day after I got back home.

 

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

 

He sits for a long time at the table, not seeing, not hearing anything. When he feels strong enough to move he gets up very slowly and locks the house and goes out, walking into the world. His body feels old and through the dark lens on his eyes everything he knows looks strange and unfamiliar, as if he's lost in a country he's never visited before.

 

 

E
ven before their departure, when he goes to meet her flight from Cape Town, he knows he's in trouble. He last saw her a month ago and she was in a bad way then, but look at her now. The first one off the plane, striding far ahead of the crowd. Her peroxide job has gone wrong, so that her hair has turned a strange yellow colour, standing out in angry spikes from her head. But more than this, something has changed inside her, which you can see from a long way off. She seems to burn with a luminous white light. Her face is knotted and anxious, bunched in on itself, and it takes her a long time to notice him. Then her expression clears, she smiles, as they embrace she is his old friend again.

 

He has been up in Pretoria for a few weeks, visiting his mother. But even before he left Cape Town, Anna was already losing the plot, living in fast motion, speeding along, saying and doing inappropriate things, and the knowledge that she was out of control showed in her face like a concealed pain. All of this has happened before, but it's only a few days ago that her condition has finally acquired a name. Although it's come from her psychiatrist in Cape Town, the diagnosis is one which Anna's lover and I and even Anna herself all regard with suspicion. For us she remains human first and foremost, impervious to labels.

 

He is pretty sure about all this until he sees her. It's obvious that something in her has come loose from its moorings and is sliding around inside. There are problems ahead, I realize, and the first moment comes before we've even left the ground. In the departure lounge she orders a beer, then looks at her companion in bemusement as he stares.

 

What. What's the matter.

 

You're not supposed to be doing that. We spoke about this yesterday, remember.

 

It's just one drink.

 

You're not allowed even one drink.

 

She has come with a small pharmacy in her bag, tranquillizers and mood-stabilizers and anti-depressants, which have to be taken in various combinations at different times, but alcohol or recreational drugs will undo the medication, and she solemnly swore to me over the telephone the day before that she wouldn't touch them. She has given the same pledge to both her lover and her psychiatrist.

 

When I remind her of this promise she angrily cancels the order, but no sooner has the plane taken off than she orders a double whisky. A little drink every now and then, she says, won't do me any harm. I'm speechless at her defiance, but the incident is rapidly subsumed in an ongoing disorder. When the food arrives she messes it over herself, then clambers over another passenger on her way to the bathroom to clean up. As the journey goes on, she becomes frantic to the point of tears because she's not allowed to smoke a cigarette, and when they arrive in Bombay after midnight she spends the long taxi ride into town unzipping and rummaging through all the pockets of her rucksack in search of some missing item. Once they're installed at the hotel she becomes a bit calmer, but almost immediately she leaves him in the room, locking the door behind her, and goes to the rooftop restaurant for yet another little drink.

 

 

O
n the last occasion that she went off the rails, years ago, she landed in a Cape Town clinic, emaciated and scarred with cigarette burns. It took months for her to recover, a process that she fetishized in her photographs, many of them pictures of herself naked, all her wounds on display. The episode is sexy in her mind, no cause for shame, and culminated in several bouts of electro-shock therapy, which she'd asked for, she later told me, as a substitute for killing herself.

 

It's partly to avoid a repetition of the same scenario that he's invited her to come along with him on this, his third trip to India. He's going for six months and the plan is that Anna will join him for the first eight weeks. And it seemed in the beginning like a good idea to everybody. Back home in Cape Town she has a powerful job with a very high profile and a future full of impressive possibilities. Normally she is more than a match for the challenges of her work, attacking it with a fervour that now looks suspect. But both her job and her relationship are under strain at the moment, and this is meant to be time out. A couple of months away from home, a chance for Anna to find herself and stabilize. Maybe it's just what she needs.

 

Although the start has been tough, things will be easier, he reasons, when they reach their destination. They are heading for a tiny fishing village in south Goa, where he has spent the previous two winters. There will be nothing to do except lie around in the sun or go for long walks on the beach or swim in the warm sea. Surely the indolence will slow her down. Besides, as her psychiatrist has said, it will take a couple of weeks for the medicine to kick in properly. Better times lie ahead.

 

Before they can fully relax, however, there is still one more journey to get through, and on the train the next day a new drama develops. He is strict about supervising her medication, and even in the rocking train carriage he makes sure that she counts out her assortment of pills. As she starts swallowing them he turns away, but sees from the corner of one eye the jerk of her arm as she throws a tablet out of the window. What are you doing. She instantly breaks down weeping, I can't handle it, these tranquillizers knock me out, I can't function. He feels a stab of pity, at this early point he still has patience and compassion. You have to take them, Anna, your body will adjust.

 

He will soon establish, when he sits down to examine the note from her psychiatrist, that she's been double-dosing on one of the tranquillizers, and when this imbalance has been corrected the medicine won't touch her. But right now she sleeps most of the journey away, while he stares out of the window at the changing landscape outside. He is glad of this chance just to reflect quietly, while the dry vastness of the plains gives way by degrees to the lush, steamy heat of Goa.

 

He is middle-aged now and his travelling habits have changed. He has become more sedentary, staying in one place for longer periods of time, with less of that youthful rushing around. But this new approach has its problems. On a previous trip to India, waiting in a town far to the north for some bureaucratic business to be finished, he became aware that he was forming connections with the place, giving money to a sick man here, calling the vet to attend to a stray dog there, setting up a web of habits and social reflexes that he usually travels to escape. He wonders now if he hasn't taken a step further down that road by bringing his troubled friend with him on the trip. Here they are, barely arrived, and already he feels chords of alarm twanging deep down. But the motion and heat are numbing, and he's calmer by the time evening comes and they have broken out at last into paddy fields and stretches of blue water between palm trees. Anna wakes and looks out of the window in amazement. Are we there yet. Almost.

 

The sun is setting as they reach Margao, a dirty bustling town like countless others they've passed along the way, but fortunately there's no need for them to linger. Their destination is a twenty minute ride by auto-rickshaw through tracts of greenery with the last golden light cooling overhead, and somewhere along the way she puts a hand on his arm and tells him how beautiful it is. Thank you for bringing me, she says. I'm so glad to be here.

 

When they arrive at the little family-run hotel where he usually stays, there are familiar faces to welcome them and a room has been kept aside. He takes a shower and when he comes downstairs to the restaurant she's drinking a gin-and-tonic. Oh come on, she cries when she sees his face, I'm on holiday, what do you want from me.