London and the God Tide

I’m trying to write about light. That’s what they asked for, isn’t it? “You have to open your eyes now honey”, they kept on saying. “Come on now, it’s daytime. You have to open your eyes now”.

In the end, they had to peel off the eyelids, too soporific to stay, too unrepentant, but they sliced them up to soup and fed them back to me through a cannula they’d found buried in a pillowcase, so that now, whenever it rains my blood wants to sleep. My eyes, however, do not know how to close, and I’ve taken to wandering around like some comic-horror figure, goading strangers into playing the game against the unflinching face. Surgical lines in permanent marker still visible, I must have looked quite the character.

I had to go for regular check-ups after those three days in April, you know, with the dull roots and the dried tubers, the cruel memory, all that desire; my doctor was called Sanatorium. Doctor Sanatorium, meet your brand-new convalescent! Why, the two of you should get on like a house on fire! She wanted two things from me, though of course I never gave her either, and lied to her frequently.

“Firstly, Little Miss Convalescence, I want to know that you remember your name. Before September, I need you to be able to breathe it aloud. Can you do that for me?”. I let my unblinking eyes stew.

“Secondly, I need you to show me some light; now, I couldn’t care less whether you’ve glued it in wisps and threads to your hands or plugged up your ears with it so that eventually it should come leaking out like black sludge, I just need to see it sometime soon”.

I heard those two words an awful lot that summer, ‘sometime soon’, though I never could quite make out what they meant, thus let myself use them often. Evasion, ambivalence, these are the things I pride myself on, and the brightest sparks I ever did manage to find.

In the daytime, a few months after the botched procedure, I watched the sun dance lazy shapes over my dead grandfather’s name – that is to say, I watched the sun lap at the skin of a boy with his name. I though to myself, cross-legged across from him on the hottest day in June, that if I myself could be the sun, touch his skin and draw some mark across it, maybe I’d get to know the dead man from years ago and learn I’m not the only one who can’t stand all this light. Pilferer of names, pilferer of light, I watched this boy all day long, wondering when would be a good time to take either, sitting sullen, silent, shrunken as I realised it’d soon be dark and I had no name nor a drop of light to carry home with me, to leave at the foot of the doctor. I’d left summer’s sickly fruit to rot in my bag, and I found the festering pineapple dying in cupboard a few weeks later; I never could take in front of other people, never used the Doctor’s bathroom or let her give me a cup of coffee – wanted to be abject, turn myself to an island – what on earth did I have to give?

“You didn’t miss much when you were gone, you know. All very tedious stuff, those last few weeks. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Oh. Thanks. I suppose it doesn’t sound like much, from this distance. Quite strange to be away from it all now, though, and so quickly.”

“Yeah, well, um, like I said, not much to miss. We all missed you though, when you weren’t there.”

“Yes. I missed you all too.”

I watched this boy all day long, and whenever his gaze met mine, I swear my unblinking eyes felt like they could finally sleep. Piercing green, the only good side of the light, all else gaudy, mocking, grotesque. Look at me again, let me tell you everything I mourn, all the things they took from me. I look at your eyes and I swear I could sleep again, I swear I could drift off to that faraway place, the good dark side of the world – but I don’t give him a thing. Of course I don’t. Eighteen months of looking and looking away, conversations on Sonnets, Barthes, Mr Carroll’s old Nonsense, and we know nothing of each other that isn’t written down somewhere. And as I watched the sun set, as the grass grew cold and our skin turned from gold to blueish grey, I knew we never would know a thing about one another, that it was much too late and I’d soon turn to weeping, ugly as it was with my coverless eyes.

“Regent’s Park is dying”

“I’ll walk you to Baker Street”

“It’s too late”

“I know”

“I’ll never see you again”

“Really it’s for the better”

“You’re gone”

“Yes”

“Forever”

“Yes”

Underground now, your eyes lingered a second too long as we went our separate ways, you Northbound, me South. And at that moment, the only light I could see for miles, I wondered what it would be like to take them. They lingered too long, I’ve said it before, and the look you left me with had me finally weep, starry tears lost to the London Underground. I’d glimpsed the only light I could stomach, boy with the name I’d take back, and I couldn’t take either. No point now, in crawling back to Dr San, no point at all, much better to stay here where no light breaks through at all.

All summer long I haunted the train tracks under that lonely city. They make for interesting scenery, don’t you think? And they taught me an awful lot; I learnt to scuttle along, another creature they couldn’t put down, one with a hoarse throat; I’d watch the lights bleed red and haunt the ghosts; I felt the rain eat the tall, glass buildings, and wandered down to South Kensington, looking for the native woman, the one who liked her reading rooms and the Old Round House and the art of collecting stones. She stood quite tall, her body all puffed up; she was trying to be kind, but I could sense the slight contempt. She told me that I was a wasted girl. “In this age, why not make something for yourself, now you have the chance? Why steal the boy’s eyes, when a man’s world will leave you blind?”

She sounded like the doctor, like the nurses. These women all ask for too much.

I took a turn along the tracks and headed for King’s College Hospital, looking for the woman with a boy’s haircut, the woman who liked to frighten, who did not care that she had all the brutality of manhood, yet bled girl in agony. The ghost was small. She was furious. She spat torturous jokes and begged to be left alone; she’d had enough of dialogue, the human form in relation to another; she locked the bathroom door and resumed her soliloquy alone.

August was ending. I was getting desperate. Slowly, slowly, I found myself crawling north again, up to Primrose Hill. I was looking for the foreign accent, the towering woman, asleep for all I knew, exhausted after birth and birth again, death and rebirth. In her kitchen, dark at last, I lay down and slept.

***

It is October now. I am laying on the cold hard wood of a lighthouse’s floor. The walls are lined with bottle after bottle of red wine. I do not know how I got here. I think I must have wandered up dazed one night, circling round and round the spiral stairs, trying to outrun the swinging beam of bright light, as I did for days in this corner-less room, nowhere to hide, only my empty voice to yell at the sky. The days have drawn thin, by now. I got tired of running, shouting; I lay down, I let the light wash over me in breaks and frights and little gaps of time. I let it wash over me even now, now, wait a beat, and now, but it does not cleanse. I do not eat it.

And in the lighthouse, where light abounds, I thought I would’ve glutted myself on the stuff. Filled myself so laboriously, so neurotically, that the sickly substance would be streaming out of every pore. I thought I would fill myself so thoroughly with light that Little Miss Convalescence would never be empty again.

But I am still the same girl who would not open her eyes.

Instead, I take down a bottle of deep red wine and gulp it down, bit by bit, watching the emptiness drain, turning each yelling reproof to a bout of wicked laughter. My hands are no longer mine. This name is not mine – it is merely an epithet, I, the character. And as a character, I must have been the one to set this house alight. Look, it is burning. Look! Look, I am full of the stuff! I am burning up with all this light, surely this stuff is light! The fire is dead, it chases me, it dies again. Birth and rebirth, the dead woman with two children, the dead woman with no children, the rats underground, their thousand-strong army. I am falling down and down and down. Maybe I have escaped the burning house. Maybe I am the burning house, maybe all the light ever wanted to do was escape. I slump down. The light washes over me, then dies again.

*** 

Foreign arms to rescue me again. Always foreign arms. Up off the floor, and down the thousand steps, they set me in a boat with my grandfather’s name, the one I never met, and it smells like him and it smells like God and I drift off to sleep and the little convalescent sheds her worn skin and is never seen again. She leaves the light. She claws off the dead man’s name, and eats it.