Signs of Life (20 page)

I felt dizzy and sick the whole time; I was in a constant free-fall. I knew, intuitively, that when I hit the ground it was going to be bad because I was falling so far but
after several days I was willing that hard landing because I just wanted to stop spinning. It wasn’t enough to kill the thought. And so, when my sister was out for the night, I took some
pills.

It was like the nursery rhyme about the old lady who swallowed a fly: I took the pills to swallow the drink, I took the drink to swallow the smoke, I took the smoke to swallow
the caffeine, I took the caffeine to swallow the thought that wrangled and jangled and chewed my insides. Chiefly what I remember of the overdose – although you can’t really call it
remembering, it’s more an impression – is a sense of merging, no separation anywhere. Know. Don’t know. And then forget. Swim on, strong strokes, go deeper, until the river gives
into the deep green depths: a calm and easeful place where the edges of the breath dissolve into limitless space.

Events have been washed out of shape by thinking of them over and over. Sometimes it seems as though none of this really happened and then I come back to the fact of
Carl’s death.

Carl chased me into the building and up the stairs but I don’t know where he is now. I cut my hand on the latch as I rushed into Carl’s flat and I am inside with my
back against the door, one hand clutching the other hand tightly, covering the cut, staunching the blood.

I keep seeing the moment that I see Molly crouch on the window ledge as the bird flies by and the moment she leaps out and away and falls down. Oh, Molly. I am replaying it
over and over on a stuck loop. I hear grunting and scraping and panting. The top of Carl’s head appears at the open window.

I experience the violence of extreme fear and it is like being run over, run
through
, by an invisible juggernaut. This horrible lurching feeling of having missed a step
stays with me even now.

I am at the window and I slam it shut – I remember doing this – I slam it before I look at him. And then he raises his head and I jump back, away. Carl begins
banging his forehead on the windowpane; red face, hair in his eyes and all over the place. Mouth wide open with threads of spittle – delicate, like the start of a new spider’s web
– connecting his upper and lower teeth.

And the glass breaks, of course. A fairly big piece falls and leaves a volcano-shaped hole in the window, an odd detail but I have it, and other pieces fall, cutting the air
down five storeys and shattering on the pavement around Molly’s little body. Most of the windowpane is still in the frame. There is more blood now, Carl’s. A crunch as shards fall out
and maybe a sliver cuts him or a piece gets in his eye because he lets out an animal cry of pain.

He is yelling, demanding entry. I don’t think I calculated what would happen if I let him in and then ran out of the flat and down the five flights of stairs. Would I
have got away from him? Would he have caught up with me on the cold concrete staircase with the thin echo that nobody would hear? He keeps shouting to be let in, and I open the window.

It happened so fast, and writing it is so slow. The act and the representation of the act, there’s a hopelessly wide gap between them.

The window doesn’t actually touch Carl as I push it upwards but maybe the movement puts him off. Broken glass falls onto our two heads like a handful of anti-confetti. He
seems to lose his foothold and he slips down a little but he grabs the windowsill and holds on with both hands. He’s frightened now; I can see it in him. He scrambles. I can hear his boots
kicking against the wall, desperately searching for anything, anywhere to push up from. He’s trying to pull himself up higher, to get an arm over the ledge, trying to pull his head and upper
body over the ledge and into the room, to get that balance of weight through the window so he can land with a thud on his own floor, safely. His body is fighting; the organism wants to save itself,
but there is a bigger fight going on inside him. I am pretty sure he decides, just then, to let go, because I
see
the decision rise in him, it comes over him like an eclipse.

I reach out. My fingers brush his neck as I take hold of his collar, or what would have been his collar if he were wearing a shirt but he is probably wearing a T-shirt so the fabric in my fist
must be a handful of that. I do touch him; touch his skin I mean, touch his bare neck with my hand, but lightly, no more than a brush.

It wasn’t your fault, said my sister.

It wasn’t your fault, said the doctors and nurses.

It wasn’t your fault, said Shirin and Delilah.

Everybody wanted me to be innocent or to stay innocent and maybe I should have taken this line immediately and stuck to it, singing it like a national anthem in my own country,
no questions allowed, unless the questions are patriotic.

Immediately Carl fell, everything became distant. The pills they gave me later made it more distant still. I remember smoking cigarettes and feeling as though I was the smoke.
A policewoman gave me the cigarettes and I wondered if she would get them back on expenses.

The police kept asking: Was it your fault? Not in those exact words, but this is what they wanted to find out. A man is dead. Was it your fault? All the questions suddenly
became one question and not just
a
question,
the
question: Has a crime been committed?

When I did speak, it felt awkward – like stumbling, or like I had a sponge for a tongue. I sounded odd to myself but I couldn’t work out why and I would ask each
visitor: Do I sound weird to you? My sister was the only one who said yes. She said you are falling over your words and they are blurring; it’s the pills. It was such a relief to be told this
and to realize that the reason I couldn’t speak properly was the same reason I couldn’t think properly, and it was these massive white tablets they were giving me at regular intervals,
the kind of drug that could take down a racehorse, and I did wonder if these pills – so much bigger than the ones I gave myself – were a prize or a punishment.

I have been told that soon after I took my own little pills, I called Johnny and started talking about
getting back to the beach
, telling him urgently that
the glass
slipper is on the beach
. He knew instantly that something was terribly wrong, and he called my sister and she called an ambulance and they all rushed to the flat where I was, by now,
drowning.

I want to be released from the pressure of this story. I want to deliver the weight of it into the writing and when sometimes I manage it, afterwards I am more relaxed, like a
dancer after the dance – limbs tired but hanging effortlessly, body light but grounded, a thing well used.

In a dream I am fighting a big tabby cat, up on its hind legs, the same height as me, and we are engaged in an old-fashioned boxing match. I am wearing boxing gloves but
through the padded, balloon-like black gloves, I feel the cat’s hard, sharp little teeth against my fist. The fight feels more like a dance because there is no actual violence, though there
is a real struggle going on. What stays with me from this dream, even ten years later, is the feel of those hard, sharp teeth through the gloves and a sense of great power – the cat’s,
not mine – being held back.

I knew, somewhere, that what I needed was a sitting down moment. A simple, spacious sitting down moment, a rest on a bench with my face in the sun and let it all come down and meet the floor,
landing gently, in its own good time. I knew this but I didn’t dare to act on the knowledge. The drink and the cigarettes and the pills had me. Except, of course, they didn’t; I had
myself. I was afraid. It seemed easier to carry on playing the part, to keep smoking and drinking and not eating properly, to keep slipping below thought, ducking responsibility. Keep wriggling on
the hook.

I like my music empty – just one or two instruments, a piano or a cello or a guitar, a voice maybe. I like to enter the music and walk around in it or if I can’t
achieve that, then I like to get right up alongside, reach into the music and pull out an empty feeling.

In hospital I sometimes thought I could hear a piano being played several rooms away and I would go wandering down long shiny corridors with swing doors, the hospital body’s own system of
veins and valves, in search of this music that I never found and eventually concluded that it must be the sound of distant water pipes. I felt that I would like to stay in hospital for a very long
time. I just couldn’t imagine having to get dressed, brush my hair and teeth, wash myself, prepare food; what a lot of time and effort it all seemed to take.

I started to make my own rules. I decided that there are only two emotions, love and fear, and that all the others are shades of these. I made lists:

Courage, enthusiasm, kindness are all forms of love. Elegance, respect, forgiveness too. Anything that tightens the heart – hatred, envy, anger, judgement, greed – comes from fear,
the fear of losing. (Stephen King says he thinks fear is at the root of most bad writing, I think he’s right and I think that fear is at the root of most bad living too.) What are we afraid
of losing? The things that make us feel safe and solid, like property, work, money, power, control, but most of all – love.

One day, working on my Love and Fear lists, happily dividing all of human experience into two neat columns, I had a brainwave. Fear isn’t the opposite of love; fear is what arises when
love isn’t there, so maybe, I reasoned, there is only one emotion. There is only love, and the absence of love.

The novelty of being in hospital began to wear off. There were disturbances. The nurses made private telephone calls just outside the ward. I didn’t want to hear the
results of their fertility test or what time and on what train their mother-in-law was arriving, but it was as though they were in the same room as me. I reached a point where I couldn’t
stand it for a minute longer. I wanted to get out of there. I was sick of the slowness and the two rows of bodies whimpering through the night.

I am getting married, said Johnny, at my bedside. And suddenly I can’t hear anything because the wind is howling in my ears. I tried to look undaunted but I felt my eyes
widen and my mouth and chin collapse, just for a millisecond. Of course he noticed; we reveal ourselves in the smallest gestures.

To the other Rachel, I say, a statement not a question.

Yes.

She is not ‘the other’ now then, is she? She is ‘the one’.

Johnny shakes his head as if this stuff doesn’t matter, and then he brings my satin shoes out of his backpack and puts them neatly on the end of my bed.

What the . . . ?!

You wanted them, he says, you asked for them.

I do not remember asking for them, but I know that he is referring to the nonsense I garbled to him on the phone:
the glass slipper is on the beach
.

In the middle of one hospital night, a cat appeared at the end of my bed. I sat up and looked at the cat, a dark tabby, like the cat in my dream, except this was a normal sized
cat and this wasn’t a dream. I felt its weight on the mattress as it picked up its paws and padded up the bed towards me. There was no purring or any other noise, in fact the ward was
unusually quiet. I could tell by its atmosphere that this was a wild cat. I held very still, willing it to come closer. The cat came within arm’s reach and slowly I put out my hand to touch
it and it was gone. I didn’t fall asleep again afterwards.

Johnny leaves pretty quickly after presenting me with the glass slippers. I have no right to feel abandoned, yet I do, and I can’t smoke or drink my way out of this one.
Once he’s gone, I go out of the ward and into the corridor and look out of the huge window. Three floors below me is the main entrance to the hospital. I look down and I see Johnny leaving
the building; I know it’s him because of his height and his curly yellow hair bobbing down the stairs. He has a spring in his step, which irritates me. I am holding the beautiful satin shoes,
still a bit stunned by his news – he’s only known her for six weeks – and by him bringing me these shoes, which seems like a cheap trick now; confuse the confused lady with a pair
of shoes after you have just told her that you are getting married to someone else. He hadn’t even approved of these shoes, we fought over them, and now he’s handing them to me as if
they are some sort of consolation prize. Suddenly I am more than irritated, I am incandescent. I hurl one of them out of the window after Johnny. I aim for his head. He doesn’t even notice.
The glass slipper lands on the steps.

The cat may have been a hallucination, although I prefer to think of it as a visit from some other dimension because the experience was more real than real. Of course the cat
made me think of Molly, though this one was a tabby and Molly was black, but thoughts and memories of other things stirred too, like snowdrop bulbs taking root in dark earth, months before the
flowering, a very delicate and secret beginning. I am not sure what the purpose of the cat’s visit was, other than to remind me of these, as yet unnameable things.