The Thing Itself (8 page)

Dreams were uncomfortable. I slept badly for so long that I grew accustomed to sleeping badly. I had odd little blackouts, such that I would wake, suddenly, lying on the grass outside my flat, in the dark, in the cold, in my pyjamas, in a state of disorientation and fear. I presumed I had sleep-walked outside, and lain down. Several times the police found me about the town and entertained me with the hospitality of their cells. I was drinking a lot, it’s true. Nowadays counselling and support would be made available to somebody in my situation – the victim of a crime, after all. Attempted murder no less! Not back then.

And the thing is: the attempted murder didn’t bother me. Roy’s unsuccessful attempt to end my life. That sounds blasé, doesn’t it? It’s true though. Curtius was a nutjob. I knew his attack upon me was nothing personal. What bothered me were the hallucinations. The things that I had seen in Antarctica. The thing that I had seen. Not that I had
had
hallucinations, in the conventional sense; because (as a friend pointed out), I’d been drugged, and drunk, and sensorily deprived in the Antarctic night. It was hardly surprising that my mind had started playing tricks.

It was the persistence.

Looking back, I can see that there was a very long sine wave resonating through my life. One year of misery would be followed by a second, and then would come a glorious third and the nightmares would recede, if never quite vanishing. My concentration and energy levels would improve. I would sleep better, drink less, focus more on my work. Then I would see him – a boy, stringy-framed, simple clothes. A ghost. For a long time I assumed he was me, the ghost of myself as a little boy. I thought this partly because the ghost-boy had a scarred face (although his pattern of scars was different to mine, and although I had not
been
scarred as a youth). I wondered if perhaps I was dead. Maybe I’d died at the South Pole, and now I was living some ghastly afterlife purgatory. Maybe the ghost of the boy was there to haunt my death with my life. My thirteen-year-old life, back when I was young, and reading
Shoot!
and
2000 AD
on a Saturday morning, and eating Blackjacks and Fruit Salad chews, and cycling my Chopper through the park. It wasn’t easy to get a good look at the ghost. Thirteen, I’d guess. Something like that. That’s the way with ghosts, though, isn’t it? Usually he would be in the corner of my bedroom. Or I might see him standing just outside the tepee of light cast by a street lamp. Or in a crowd, and I would
feel
him more than see him. Sometimes I got a better look. He didn’t look anything like me.

The ghost-boy’s appearance marked the point from which the sine wave would begin its inexorable downslide. For a full year the nightmares would increase in vividness and regularity. Back in the blackness and the cold, the southern lights casting an intermittent neon corpse-glow upon me, and the terrors, the terrors, the terrors, gathering all around me. Through a second year the night terrors would get inexorably worse. By year three I was barely able to function. I kept a bottle of gin on my bedside table. I moved to gin (I laugh at myself to write this, but it’s true) because in my sodden mind I told myself the juniper berry element counted as fruit, a glimpse of health, in a way that wasn’t true of my previous favourite tipple, vodka. I also drank a good deal of red wine. My teeth turned blue. My hands shook. This was my morning routine: I would wake, my face crusty with tears shed in the night, a sense of grasping, swallowing horror around me. Then I would take a swig of gin, and grimace, and cough, and take another. The discomfort of the firewater going down my parched throat was part of the routine, as much as was the slow blurring of the edges of my fear. But mostly it was the habit. Once I took my third glug – always three sips in the morning – I would have the sense of a painful but necessary ablution completed. Then: shower. Brushing my teeth. Breakfast cereal. Brushing my teeth again. Getting dressed, and a third brush of the teeth. I told myself I needed to brush my teeth thrice to disguise the fact that I started the day with alcohol, lest my employer get wind and fire me. The truth is: I had become wedded to the OCD routineness of it all.

My work at the university, substandard for years, finally dipped below the level where the authorities could continue turning their collective blind eye. I was issued with a first formal warning, and booked into training sessions designed to help me, which I either attended drunk, or skipped. I was issued with a second formal warning. My head of department took me aside, after a departmental board, and urged me to join Alcoholics Anonymous. I was distracted by the ghost of the scarred-face boy, walking down the corridor away from us both, visible over her shoulder. If he wasn’t somehow
me
then why was his face scarred?

The third formal warning was tantamount to dismissal.

Unable to land another university job I retrained as a school science teacher. I told myself this was a stopgap, and I would continue applying for university work, but three years into schoolwork it started to dawn on me that I wasn’t ever going to get back into tertiary education. This was depressing, and the depression was made more acute when I lost my teaching job. I’m not writing this narrative in order to give an account of my time as a schoolteacher, so I won’t dwell on this, except to say that I was suspended rather than being sacked. I got three months’ pay, and then the pay stopped, although my suspension carried on, for being drunk in the classroom. I had managed to modify my behaviour to the point where I would not go to work drunk in the morning. But by lunchtime I was usually in a state (maintaining discipline amongst bored and hostile teenagers disinclined to learn any physics, whilst the ghost-boy wandered through the rows of desks) that only several glasses of wine could remedy. After lunch I often went back into class under the influence. It grew more noticeable. The kids laughed about it and told their parents. The parents, when they complained to the head, were not laughing. The head had no option but to suspend me.

The three months’ suspension passed in a haze. I checked the papers for jobs, and applied for several teaching positions, but didn’t even get to interview. This at a time when the news assured me there was a national shortage of school teachers, especially in the sciences. A double blow to my ego. I signed on (you were still able to do that, back then) and lived for another six months on the dole. Eventually the dole people made my benefit conditional on me working at a series of low-grade employments: cleaning offices; working in a petrol station. So I did that. I applied for a job as a bus driver, and got as far as the sponsored HGV training, when the instructor smelt booze on my breath and dismissed me. He promised me my name would be blacklisted, and advised me not to apply for any more professional driving jobs. I accepted his scorn with as much downbeaten grace as I could muster. Eventually I found work with the council: two weeks on the dust carts, two weeks manning the Bracknell recycling station, where the public drove up to unload cardboard boxes and old toilet cisterns and bags of garden waste into the huge concrete-walled bays. The main downside (apart from the smell, and the low pay) was having to get up at 4 am every working day. I minded this less than some of the others, since sleep was an intermittent and turbulent business for me. The main upside was my gaffer was tolerant of his people taking the occasional snifter on the job. Then again, as the only middle-class, university-educated member of an otherwise solidly working-class, left-school-at-sixteen crew, I cannot pretend that I ever really fitted in.

I would drive to the depot in my old Vauxhall Astra, through pre-dawn streets and the carroty illumination of street lamps. I rarely saw another vehicle. I was often intoxicated. One time I misjudged a corner, side-swiped a parked van and drove through a hedge into the backlot of a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, causing – the subsequent court case established – £7,477 worth of damage. I was banned from driving for three years. The car was written off. Since I had been driving under the influence insurers refused to pay out for a new car. I was landed with a monthly instalment plan to pay the fine, the damages, the court fees.

I eventually got a handle on the drinking. It happens as you get older. It happens, or you don’t get older. Drink hard in your twenties and you’re a regular, fun guy. Keep drinking hard through your thirties and you start to separate yourself from fun, health and indeed other people. If you’re still doing it in your forties it’s probably because you have unresolved stresses and problems which you are clumsily and destructively self-medicating. Drinking hard into your fifties means that you’re blowing hot and cold on ever seeing your sixties. I woke up a week after my fiftieth birthday unable to remember the previous three days, and decided to stop. I could say ‘simple as that’, except that it really wasn’t simple at all. There was a clincher, though, and it was this: my main rationale for drinking was to calm myself in the face of my night terrors. But although I drank a lot, the nightmares refused to go away. I tried a few weeks of facing them without the alcohol, and though the terrors were no better they were certainly not worse. So I quit drinking.

Without booze jangling my nerves, and without needing to get up at 2 am every night to piss, I actually started sleeping better. Most nights the nightmares were still there, but every now and again I would sleep right through without disturbance. The oddest thing about that was the nights in which I was unterrified left me not with repose, but with a kind of blankness. Habit accustoms us to anything, including misery and pain. Perhaps especially to those two. Another unexpected consequence of my new sobriety was that my libido perked up again. Given my difficulties in getting laid this was rather more a burden than a joy. But it goes some way to explaining why the arrival of Irma had the effect upon me that it did.

:2:

I had a toothache. A simple enough phrase. Does not capture the intensity of the misery. When I went to my dentist, for the first time in decades, I discovered my practice had reclassified me as a private patient, without (of course) my permission. I had a half-hearted argument with the receptionist, who insisted that the practice no longer provided NHS cover at all. I was welcome to try another practice, she said. In considerable pain, exhausted, frustrated, I agreed to be seen privately provided only I
was
seen. She asked me to sit down. I crouched on the settee in the waiting room, clutching the side of my face. The pre-booked patients went through, one by one, and soon enough the room contained only me and the ghost of the young boy.

If I looked straight at him he vanished. But if I looked a little away from him I got quite a good sense of his appearance. When I was finally led through to the Big Chair and the Bright Room he trotted along too. As I settled in the padded seat and opened my aching mouth, he was standing right beside the dentist.

The treatment took hours: X-ray, back in the waiting room. Through to the Big Chair again for the anaesthetic injection, and back in the waiting room for it to take effect. My boss rang during this latter interlude, and berated me. I tried to tell him I was at the dentist, that it was a medical emergency, but it sounded like I was speaking through a mouth packed full of marshmallows, and he told me he couldn’t understand a fucking word I was saying, and gave me to understand that I was fucking around with a solid job in the middle of a fucking economy in which jobs were hens’ fucking teeth and a number of other statements in which the word
fucking
figured prominently. Finally: the drill. That high violin whine, and the burn-y stench of chewed-up tooth, and the shards of discomfort that slid through the protective sheath of my anaesthesia. The ghost-boy was there through this, leaning close in as if fascinated by the procedure. My previous night had been more or less sleepless on account of the discomfort, so I was feeling trippy and weird, but when he began to stroke the side of my face with his hand I felt it very distinctly.

The dentist wrote me a scrip. I had a second, fuzzier argument with the receptionist over the bill – a vast sum of money, hundreds and hundreds of pounds for which I simply didn’t have the funds. She offered me a payment plan, and I told her I would have to think about it. I sat back down and fell asleep there and then in the waiting room. The next thing I knew I was being shaken awake by the dentist himself, the receptionist looking on. In a half-awake state I gave them all my bank details, signed a form – who
knows
what it specified? – made a follow-up appointment and left the practice.

I wandered back to my flat, followed as if by a faithful hound by you-know-who. Was I hallucinating him? Maybe he was a remnant of the things, thing, I has seen in Antarctica. Maybe I was dead and he was me and me was he and I was so tired I could barely walk, and stumbled into a lamp post. I had just enough mental wherewithal to stop at Boots on the way and fill my scrip. By now it was lunchtime, and I was hungry, but I couldn’t face using my numb jawbone to chew. I climbed the stairs to my flat, let myself in, drank some milk, swallowed the first of my pills, and lay down on my bed.

When I awoke, the sun was setting: an early March evening, cool and rather beautiful. My whole face was tingling, like a parody version of the Christmas feeling. I stood at the window and looked across the concrete prospect of Bracknell as the west finally purged itself of red and let the interstellar black-purple own the sky. My view was of a stretch of large cuboid warehouse buildings, concrete, steel and cladding, which housed variously a long-term storage warehouse, a DIY superstore, an exhaust and tyre depot and so on. Behind them was the line of trees that marked the train line running west towards Reading. Visible in the deeper distance was the shaggy hem of Bracknell Forest, ancient and beautiful and perfectly indifferent to the industrial estate and transport infrastructure humankind had forced into its domain. But the sky! The colours in the sky passed through a series of Monet canvas richnesses; red-purple to blue-green-purple to black. Homer has a special Greek word for the colour of a deep-sea ocean water. That word, whatever it is. Then only the artificial light in the faraway empty car parks attached to the bottom of the view, and above it the glorious pure-black night sky. There were clouds, and there were also breaks in the cloud, and some stars visible, and something in the starved, drugged lightness of my head made the direct connection between the tingling in my face and the pinpricks of the stars. For a moment there really was no barrier between the curve of the night sky and the curve of my swollen jaw. The two were, in some sense, the same thing.
In some sense
is mealy-mouthed of me, I know. You want to rebuke me. You want to remind me that I trained as a scientist, and to urge me to precision and evidence and some falsifiable thesis. It wasn’t rational; but it wasn’t vague either. I was filled with insight, the way my skull is filled with my brain. The insight sat snugly inside me, as if the cavity had been designed to be exactly the right size to fit it. The insight was something like this: distinguishing between the outside world and my inner existence was abruptly revealed to me as
a false step
. Or not quite that. It was the realisation that I had been construing that distinction wrongly all this time. It was not a separation. It was an inflection, a refinement. It was a connection. The world and I constituted not two separate things, but a totality.