Mouthing the Words (14 page)

“Well, not wonderful that you should feel that way, but refreshing to hear that you know what it feels like,” I explain.

“Well, I had suspected you felt similarly,” he says.

“What made you think that?”

He is good enough not to suggest the obvious—a thousand immediately observable neuroses—and says, “I thought that’s what you’d picked up from me. Why you’d written.”

“I don’t know why I wrote, “I think aloud. “I’ve never done that before.”

“Well, I’m glad you did,” he says, smiling at me.

—

We are moving in each other’s shadows, taking delicate steps at fifty-degree angles, peering out occasionally to catch the sun in each other’s hair. It involves talking into the early hours of the morning on benches outside pubs after closing. Holding hands and speaking softly and sharing little details hitherto housed in a bulging file of secrets. It is lovely and I am becoming braver. I think this man is my boyfriend. I think I am in something called a relationship. It is hard for me to know if I am, because I do not know what one is supposed to feel like. I realize this is what it must be, but perhaps there are just not enough words in English
to
describe this kind of arrangement. Arrangement. As if it has order, a structure somehow.

I call him on the phone and ride my bike to his house in east Oxford on sunny afternoons in the spring. Sitting in his garden, he tells me he planted aubrietia because it reminds him of me—hugging the ground and beautiful. I have never been beautiful before. He is making tea and toast and soft-boiled eggs and he is asking me to live with him. He is forty-one years old and doesn’t want to live alone any longer. He wants to share this house. He wants to love me. He holds my hands in his and I like the feel of his hands. I stare at them all the time, marvelling that they are real, that they have built houses and that they want to hold my face. I like leaning my forehead against his chest—the hardness of his breastbone and his heart beating close to the surface. I like the smell of him through his shirt. I feel fragile and hesitant, but not afraid. Small and slow-moving, but not stopping. He wants to make love to me, but he fears it. He fears the pain, to cause it, but also to feel it. He finds sex very painful, he tells me. And because he knows pain and because he is as afraid as I am, this talk does not frighten me. He knows sex can kill. He needs to hold my hand all the way to the doctor’s. And hold my hand all the way home. And hide with me there in the dark and quiet after his circumcision, where he feels embarrassment, shame and pain, and I feel gentle, giving.

—

I am sitting quietly with Patrick on the grey carpet, watching first division football on the TV. He is trying not to drink much.

We are sleeping side by side now, my head in his armpit, listening to the sounds a man makes in his sleep. The sounds are unfamiliar but I feel ready to hear them, ready to listen.

He is getting better, pulling on his Levi’s and smiling now. Getting ready for football practice and lacing up his shoes. Saying: Let’s get a really good bottle of wine and go down to the river later. I think I might have liked it better when we were quiet though, because I can feel the effort involved in my smile. It’s not coming naturally like it was only two weeks ago. What’s coming naturally now is a familiar fear, which creeps up from my feet to my face. He is telling me he can hardly wait to make love to me and I am thinking, If only I could have an operation, too. If only I could rest for a time in quiet pain and awaken new and willing. He is looking forward and I am closing inward. He is thinking of oceans, swimming, and freedom, while I am thinking of twigs and rocks and the rotten, hollow carcasses of trees.

I am waking from a terrible dream where I am being crushed between the jaws of a faceless, dying monster, a dragon consuming human lives in order to sustain its existence. My body is pinned down and my lungs are collapsing. Patrick is on top of me and I have stopped breathing. My ribs have been crushed and my lungs
deflated
, but blood is coursing through me, spinning through my head. Every inch of me is observable heartbeat. “I think I am dying,” is all I can manage to get out.

“Oh sweetheart, I was just hugging you,” says Patrick gently. “It just feels good to be this close to you.”

But I know this is not right. I feel him hard and wanting and I am confused.
Are you lying, Patrick? To love me like this is to kill me. This is how love feels
.

I am enlisting Heroin’s support. I am summoning the army of her with my thoughts and she is galloping on her white horse through gardens in east Oxford, ploughing through vegetable patches and ripping up flowerbeds, leaping fences and kicking up a massive great cloud of dark soil. The cloud is hanging there, low over the garden and Patrick says, “What can we do about it? It’s so ominous. Can’t we make it go away?” But I know he cannot say the right thing and make it retreat, he can only say the wrong thing and bring it closer. And closer and closer it comes.

Limited Options in the Late Twentieth Century

SLEEP IS NO
longer an option. There are fewer and fewer options altogether. Crispin Stuck won’t give me permission to climb the tower and none of the bridges in Oxford are quite high enough. There is Port Meadow where I could lie in the grass like Lewis Carroll and dream of Alice and pray that the horses and cows would run over my hidden, prostrate body. If it were a century earlier I could commit a heinous crime and be shipped to Australia and hope that a storm would cast me into homicidal waters. There was the twelve gauge my father used to have in the house that was never really a house and certainly never a home in the country.

I am worried that he sees me. I am worried that he lives in other men’s eyes and that he is looking through the eyes of that Jesus on Canterbury Road, following
me
. Sometimes I see him, a tiny speck in Patrick’s irises, and I am terrified. Although Patrick is much bigger, he has no idea that another man is lurking in his eyeball, waiting for a moment to strike out. I am on guard. I do not sleep now. I watch Patrick’s face while he dreams and I feel like I am in terrible danger. I have it in mind that I will have to secure Jesus on the crucifix with a few more nails. I will do it at night, I will use thick screws and I will chisel out his eyes.

There is the medicine cabinet. It strikes me that it is the only option of this time and place because I cannot find a bridge, or a ship on cruel waters, or a herd willing to trample me, or a gun, and I cannot wire a car, or make myself worth being murdered, and Jesus can be resurrected. But I do know how to swallow. I’ve had years of practice.

BOOK 2

Out-of-body Privileges

I’VE THROWN MY
bed out. It’s lumpy and it moves on wheels while I toss pennies in my sleep. I have only the mattress now, one side wedged into the inches between the radiator and the floor. This is where I am—pinned in the remotest corner of a psychiatric hospital where I read, eat, smoke, drink tea, write and twitch late into each night. But not sleep. I don’t sleep here. I haven’t slept for weeks. I have stopped lying down. I am afraid of the dreaming. I sit instead with my back roasting against the radiator. Hard brown stripes run parallel to my spine, and my thighs have bruises caused by the rough hands of men in dreams.

It is not proper dreaming, because I am not asleep. I am awake, semi-conscious, levitating, dreaming about a mouth loud and bloody, seething, tearing the stitches that can no longer bind it closed. I rise up, up above it, stapled to the wall here, like a little leech looking down
on
the world over a huge bed, which grows wider and wider and longer and touches the frame of the door.

There are different rooms that can look virtually the same from this perspective. There are different nights, and different years—and though the images are always the same, they are nonetheless frightening, they are creatures that can never be tamed. I have been dreaming this dream continuously and to be awake and to be alive is simply to distract me from its buzz, hum, suspension.

I am snapped back away from it, sweating because it is the witching hour and Poppy is plodding through a waltz on the old piano. Poppy’s playing kills dreams. Kills mine, but catapults Clare into the open arms of the devil. Clare is here screaming thickly, the sound bubbling its way through blood. I couldn’t hear her this clearly when she lived down the hall from me in the vicarage on Canterbury Road. But when I came here, she told me. She limped toward me, blue haired and wild-eyed, and said, “I put you here.”

“This has nothing to do with you,” I told her.

But she repeated, “I put you here. It was all those times I called you
CUNT
when you walked by me in the hall. I was screaming
CUNT
at you.”

“Clare,” I objected, “I never heard you say that.” She walked by me then, blankly, through the garden toward the dirt in the dead flowerbed of February.

I tell myself that my being here has nothing to do with her, but I am not certain. Maybe she speaks
another
language, a dialect that I don’t understand consciously but one I can nevertheless hear with something other than my ears. Now I hear cunt all the time. I see cunt, I feel cunt, I smell cunt, I am cunt.

My door is open to a constant stream of traffic. The fuckers coming. Coming to fuck, fucking to come. Names beginning with the letter D. Damian and Dave and Dangerous and Dick. One long endless semiconscious dream about fucking—fucking a mouth that is trying to inhale the world, sucking.

—

Smartie time. That’s what Sasha in the lineup in front of me calls it. Temazepam and Haloperidol. I love it, boxing the air around me, determined to stand up. I can fight as hard as I can, my mind and my body flying, punching, racing, going nowhere—you could blow me over in one short breath. “It’s time for bed, Thelma,” a white voice speaks from somewhere. But I am loving the sound of my own voice, loving the way everything rhymes, but my lips, my lips are no longer moving, and my feet, they’ve been lifted from the floor. I am being carried like a piece of firewood, about to be thrown into the flames rising from my bed. I will not lie down. I am sure that if I lie down I will burn here. By the cold light of morning I will be nothing but a grey log that has retained its shape, and when they shake me, I will crumble into ashes.

I sleep, drugged, diseased, deceased. I burn and crumble and rise again like a phoenix. I am not well,
they
tell me. Have I always been not well? Have I always been what they tell me? I have only my journal to go by, but I am sure other people have been writing in it. There are passages here by people I don’t know. There is a lot of bad writing. I know I haven’t always lived here, but the only places I am willing to remember are the ones twelve paces away or less.

There are women here who cannot remember their names or which room they live in. They have an eerie calm dullness about them. They get electroshocked. I never want to get electroshocked because then you forget where you are and then you really are crazy. I do not remember the past but I do remember the tiny things right in my face. There is a way to make a map of Canada by connecting the cracks in the ceiling, there is a way to the bathroom, there is a way to make Ovaltine and there is a way out of this place. Ultimately, though, whether it’s your past or your present that you forget, it is the forgetting that sustains you. This is a world of limited options, a world without knives and forks. Remembering to forget is the only option left.

—

One morning I wake up and look in the shiny piece of tin they call a mirror here. I look and I look and try to pry apart this face.

“Is that you?” I whisper.

“Where the fuck have you been?” the face says back to me.

“I’ve been here the whole time!” I spit back. “Where the fuck have you been?”

That was the moment we got reacquainted—me and my face. Up until then I’d been too afraid to look into this thing they called a mirror because there’d be some woman there going “blah blah blah,” and I didn’t know what the fuck she was on about. I would just brush my teeth, spit blood and hurry out of there.

After that I started asking if I could go outside. A nurse came with me at first and we would sit in silence on a bench, have a smoke and stare at nothing. Then I started feeding the squirrels. I fed them Fruit Loops that I got from the kitchen staff. I thought they looked pretty there, all pink and yellow and orange and plastic-looking, scattered on the snow. One day I made snow angels like I used to when I was little in the front yard on Merton Street. After that they let me go outside alone.

—

I was trying to concentrate. It was Mastermind and I knew all the answers, but people were making so much noise and walking in front of the television and I was getting really angry. There was this new woman, Leona, and she was just flipping out—swearing her head off, pelting out words like an automatic rifle in about a million different languages. She threw herself on the floor and writhed about, shouting, “Fuck me, suck me, chuck me, yuck me,” shoving her pelvis up to the sky.

And then I lost it. I leapt out of my chair and I screamed at her, “Shut up, you vain bitch, nobody wants to fuck you!”

“Hey!” White coat said, grabbing my arm and pulling me into the corner of the room. “She’s not well,” he said gravely.

“She’s fucked!” I shouted at him. “She’s a fucking nymphomaniac!”

“She’s just not well,” he said again.

“Well, if not well is just a big euphemism for being a fucking nymphomaniac, then OK! She’s not well! I just wish she’d shut up!”

I didn’t really believe that, about “not well” meaning you’re a nymphomaniac. I was angry, and what he said scared me. Is that what “not well” looks like? Is that what I look like when I’m not well? And why did he say it to me? Does that mean I’m supposed to know the difference now—does that mean I am no longer not well?

It’s true, I have started washing my hair now. I’ve even found an old trashy lipstick in the bottom of my duffle bag, covered in lint and tobacco, but I put some on anyway, yesterday, before I went out for a walk. The nurse at the door gushed at me, “Don’t you look pretty. Lipstick. You must be feeling better.” I told her to bugger off. That’s what she deserves for being such a patronizing bitch.