The Shapeless Unease Read online

  Also by Samantha Harvey

  The Wilderness

  All is Song

  Dear Thief

  The Western Wind

  The Shapeless Unease

  A Year of Not Sleeping

  Samantha Harvey

  Copyright © 2020 by Samantha Harvey

  Cover illustration cut-out tiger © Collection IM/Kharbine-Tapabor

  Cover design by Suzanne Dea

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  The quotation on p.56 is from ‘The Old Fools’ by Philip Larkin and is used with the permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. The quotation on pp. 57–58 is from ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’, with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. The quota-tion on p.159 is from ‘Absolute Beginners’, with lyrics by David Bowie.

  First published in 2020 in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  First Grove Atlantic edition: May 2020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  eISBN978-0-8021-4884-1

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  For all those awake in the night.

  And for those I’ve woken up; I’m sorry.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Samantha Harvey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Shapeless Unease

  Back Cover

  The Shapeless Unease

  Friend:

  What are you writing?

  Me:

  Not sure, some essays. Not really essays. Not essays at all. Some things.

  Friend:

  About what?

  Me:

  Not sure. This and that. About not sleeping, mainly. But death keeps creeping in.

  Friend:

  Murgh.

  Me:

  Murgh what?

  Friend:

  Murgh morbid.

  Me:

  But we’re all going to—

  Friend:

  But we’re not yet.

  Me:

  But we are, every day.

  Friend:

  We’re living every day.

  Me:

  In the midst of life we are in—

  Friend:

  Pff.

  Me:

  In the midst of life we are—

  Friend:

  Why don’t you write another novel instead?

  Me:

  My cousin died, alone in his flat. They think he’d been dead for two days by the time they found him. He wasn’t very old.

  Friend:

  Oh.

  Me:

  It’s not – I just – we weren’t even that close.

  Friend:

  Rotten.

  Me:

  I can’t stop thinking of him in his coffin in the ground.

  Friend:

  And yet, best not to.

  Me:

  When I think about it, grief wells up in me so large, pure grief, as if for all the people I’m going to lose. As if his death is a doorway into all deaths. What stops the parasitoid wasps and predatory beetles eating my mother’s eyes? I’m a child being hushed to sleep by her or eating pilchards on toast with her or reading Roald Dahl with her or walking with her to school or being sponged down by her while I burn with hives, and now I imagine that she is having her organs eaten by her gut bacteria and she’s decaying. And I can’t breathe, for the grief I feel.

  My cousin’s death has invited all deaths.

  I can’t breathe with this future grief.

  Friend:

  [Has gone.]

  Midnight:

  Into bed and lie down. Head goes on pillow.

  Out of bed; superstitiously plucking the strewn clothes from the floor to fold them into rough bundles and put them away – one of countless little routines undertaken to forfend a sleepless night. One of countless little routines forcibly dismissed as superstition, in the superstition that superstitious acts will only shorten the odds of sleep – but unignorable in the end. Needs must. The attaining of sleep long ago left the realm of natural act and entered that of black magic.

  Back into bed and read, a collection of William Trevor short stories. There’s sleepiness soon, like something calling from around the corner. There’s a sharp, stinging pain at the crown of my head; the scalp is being stitched with embroidery needles. The lamp is shut off and the room is more or less dark. An odd creak issues from who knows where.

  The heart starts up its thrup-thrup-thrup, a tripping percussion in a chest that now fills with breath. Breathe, breathe. And with the light out, here they come, all of them, the holy and the horrifying; here they are.

  In the medieval Ars moriendi the deathbed of a man is crowded with them, saints and demons, each vying for his soul. The demons try to tempt him into despair – there’s something monkey-like with horns and a man’s face on its belly, holding a dagger; something dog-like with a single antler and a perverse grin, a luring finger; a ram-headed demon looking over his shoulder; a satyr-like being with a hooked nose, licking its lips. Come with us into death, they say. Forsake your faith and come with us.

  And then a picture of the same man, the satyr fallen at his bedside, the leg of another demon that has scrambled in fear under the bed. Mary Magdalene and St Peter stand by his pillow, St Peter holding the key to heaven. Behind them, Jesus is crucified, his head slumped backwards over the horizontal strut of the cross, and on the headboard of the bed is the rooster of Peter’s redemption, the rooster whose crow awoke him from his denial of Christ and caused him to repent. Come with us, say the rooster, St Peter, the Christ – here is your restoration, come with us to the kingdom of heaven.

  I close my eyes and try to keep hold of that sleepiness, whose call is still there behind the heart’s syncopation. The heart a tough lump of meat, flooded with fear. Fifty minutes pass; it’s almost one. Usually if sleep is going to come it would have come by now; and if it hasn’t come by now, the probability is no sleep at all. Sweat, the first inkling of panic like a storm heard across a distant plain, just the vaguest muffled thunder. Still time to sleep; the storm might yet not come.

  St Peter hovers with the key; take it, he says, it’ll get you there. I reach out and the Devil steps in – because the desire for sleep is also the denial of it; the more you want it the less it comes. The word greed is whispered somewhere from the darkness. You are too greedy for sleep. Jesus slumps backwards, dead, mouth agape at the ceiling. The word come is whispered afterwards and I don’t know from which quarter. Saint or demon? I don’t know.

  Have faith, I hear. Have hope.

  Lose faith, I hear. Give up hope.

  Heart thrup-thrup-thrup, scalp tight. Now my small room is over-brimming. The louder thrupping
of my heart. The churning of the air. The wingbeats of the harpy, claws out, cheeks sunken in hunger, Peter sidling up towards my pillow.

  Lying on one side, cradling my head. Sleepiness vanishes, like the picture when you turned off an old TV screen; it recedes to a dot. Then there’s blankness and blackness; the yawning expanse of a night awake.

  My cousin’s next to us in the church in a sealed box, with his skin buffed to a plausible pallor and his eyes and lips glued shut. His arteries, once livid with blood, are now sluggish with embalming fluid, and his out-of-sight orifices plugged. His body running with stitches from a post-mortem. Skull cut open with a hand-saw and resewn, organs removed and approximately replaced – heart a bit far to the left, lungs a bit lopsided (hard to put them back how they were), tongue and windpipe missing. Hair washed and brushed. Shirt buttoned.

  On his chest, Michael Palin’s Pole to Pole and Himalaya.

  To my right, my aunt wailing quietly through a closed mouth, the sound you might make involuntarily if somebody sat on your chest.

  When he was born, my cousin, it was with a facial deformity, a lump whose removal left his cheek badly scarred, but scarred in a way that stopped being visible to those of us who knew him. Over the years the scar became gentle and weathered. Ill-luck was his birthright, this deforming lump and then epilepsy, seizures both regular and severe. But he’d run at his unlucky life with a quiet verve; he travelled a long way in his short time on this earth. He went to places far-flung, and usually alone. He loved Byron Bay, he took his bike to Australia and only then realised (how only then?) that it was too big to cycle around.

  Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar, Singapore, Canada, Mozambique, Russia, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Japan, most of Europe (I’m making it up, I don’t remember the eulogy’s list, was too busy eyeing the coffin to my right and thinking, he is in there, dead). A spare weekend came, or a week off work, and he’d get on a flight somewhere, or he’d get on his bike and go for hours, and one Saturday when I was doing a signing at a bookshop in Rye, not far from where he lived, he said he’d cycle down and see me; he wrote afterwards to say he was sorry he didn’t come, he couldn’t make it. That was the last time we had contact with one another. My uncle texted him a joke the day after he died, and worried when he didn’t get a reply, and I often wonder if there is a sadder thing in all the world than that unread joke on a dead person’s phone. A Facebook post shows the mapped route of a seventy-mile bike ride he did alone on what was probably the day he died. At the funeral I saw him as a child in our nan’s garden by the low wall, and I saw his widest of smiles, and I saw him dead in his bed – not face down, as he was found, but face up, with his grafted skin faintly puckering a cheek that had smashed god knows how many times against a kitchen floor or chair leg.

  Epilepsy could kill him at any time – if his head thrashed against tarmac, or the enamel of a bath, or if he was cycling, or if he swallowed his tongue, or if he had a fit and never came round.

  What is it to be so close to death so often? Yet he dodged it all those times.

  Yet it caught him that once, and with death that’s all it takes.

  Case study of possible chronic Post Brexit Insomnia (PBI):

  Patient, female, forty-three, has always slept well. She reports both ease of going to sleep and of staying asleep, usually for around eight hours a night. This pattern has tended to hold even in times of stress and difficulty.

  The patient reports that her problems with sleep began a few months after she moved house to live on a main road, when she was often woken early by traffic. This happened for several months and resulted in her sleep being disturbed. She states that she was not, at this point, an insomniac, only suffering somewhat disturbed sleep.

  Over a period of months, her sleep disturbances fluctuated. In June 2016 they began to be accompanied by anger at the result of the European Referendum, resulting in periods of restless wakefulness. By the autumn of this year she was not only waking up early with the traffic, but finding it difficult to go to sleep at bedtime. During this period she battled with anger and frustration at both the traffic and at the unfolding senselessness of politics, and found herself ‘arguing’ (patient’s expression) with the passing cars, lorries, vans and buses. She knew that there was no point in arguing in this way, and tried various strategies for endurance (earplugs, white-noise generation, alcohol slightly exceeding the recommended upper range), as well as for acceptance (mindfulness meditation, Buddhist mantras, affirmations of loving-kindness), but found them of limited use, and reports unbidden fantasies of multi-car pile-ups, earthquakes and freak cosmic events which might lead to the temporary or permanent closure of the road.

  By October of the year in question, her sleep problems had become what she would now call insomnia – difficulty going to sleep and staying asleep. She went on a silent Buddhist retreat and reports great comfort in the sound of the wind hitting her window and the pervasion of quiet, but did not find any improvement in her sleep. Indeed, it was here that she first detected the existence of persistent panic, even when engaged in easeful and calm activities.

  On arriving home from the retreat, she recalls meeting her next-door neighbour at the bus stop, who told her of the death of their lodger; this was a man not much known by the patient, but she had seen him putting the bins out only the week before, and the sadness for his death, though without lasting impact, was real and ‘a reminder of how quickly people are snatched from us’. Later that day she was informed of the separation of her sister and partner, and reports feelings of shock and sadness, for both her sister and partner, and for their three young children. Some days after this, she learned of the death of her cousin, who was found in his flat two days after he passed away. Some days later she was informed that her father’s partner had been diagnosed with dementia. A week or two after her cousin’s funeral, she learned that her father had fallen from a ladder, had badly broken his leg and would be unable to walk for a year.1

  Her sleep problems worsened over the coming weeks. Though there was some unaccounted-for respite from insomnia during December of that year, it returned in January and continued from there to worsen steadily. She reports many nights of two or three hours of sleep, these hours not always consecutive, and nights of zero sleep. In this time she tried sleeping in other rooms of the house, and moved her desk from her study to create a makeshift bedroom. This gave respite from noise, but no recovery of sleep. Sleeping aids – over-the-counter (Nytol, Sominex, Dormeasan drops, CBD oil, magnesium powders, passion flower, hop strobiles, melatonin, 5HTP) and prescription (Zopiclone, Diazepam, Mirtazapine) – were of little use.

  The patient tried many remedial approaches, including visits to a CBT sleep clinic, acupuncture, a stress-reduction mindfulness course, sleep restriction techniques, gratitude diaries, dietary supplements, abstention from caffeine and sugar, and a sleep device that emits alpha, beta and theta waves to mimic the stages of sleep. Her approaches also included experimenting with bedtimes and finding ways to occupy and calm herself during her hours of wakefulness. She reports learning French, making mosaics, playing solitaire, doing jigsaws, counting her breaths, listening to episodes of In Our Time, Tate pod-casts, The Allusionist, an audio edition of Remembrance of Things Past, Radio 4’s Soul Music, online sleep hypnosis meditations, a birdsong identification CD, episodes of Poldark and The Crown, Sanskrit chanting and Top of the Pops.2

  She reports that her aim shifted from trying to sleep to trying not to panic, and that some nights she would lie in darkness for seven hours, counting backwards from one thousand in threes, or counting backwards from one hundred in French or German, or chanting along to the Sanskrit, which she knew only as sounds rather than as words, but onto which she imposed peaceful meanings, and which she found soothing.

  Her abiding feelings over these weeks and months were of anger, loneliness, despair and fear. She suffered recurring images of her cousin in his coffin underground, images accompanied by palpitations and panic. Death occupied
many of her thoughts, along with a concern – prompted by a dream – that the journey into death would be fearful and lonely, a ‘hellish hurtle in a dark shuttle’. She was disturbed by the thought of her cousin suffering this journey, and also began to project the deaths of her loved ones.3 She also reports suspicions of having Fatal Familial Insomnia, an extremely rare hereditary disease resulting in premature death.4

  In the night she found herself re-experiencing certain memories from childhood, not so much as memories but as events being lived, such as her mother leaving and her dog dying, and these recollections brought grief and rage. She likened this to the grief and rage she felt in response to the loss – through the result of the Referendum – of many of the values she had once attached to her country, and which had given her a sense of national belonging, pride and identification.5

  The panic she had detected at the retreat the previous autumn was by now resulting in fierce attacks at night, during which she would hyperventilate, convulse and hit her head, either with her own fists or against a wall. She reports that this behaviour was the result of increasingly severe sleep deprivation.

  The patient’s work and social life became unviable during these months; she could no longer work in a sustained or coherent way. She saw little of her friends and relied heavily upon the support of her partner. By now she was experiencing around three or four nights a week of no sleep, and intermittent sleep the remaining nights. She would regularly stay awake for forty or fifty hours. Physical symptoms of sleeplessness included confusion, memory loss, palpitations, severe headaches, hair loss, eye infections and numbness in her hands.

  She claims that she awaited a breakdown and that this breakdown would be welcome. She believed that if the issue, which eluded her, could come to a head, she might then be left broken, but broken free of it. At the same time she very much doubted she would have a breakdown, surmising that there wasn’t anything decisive enough in her character to bring one about, and that she was more the kind of person who would endure pain and suffering indefinitely while just about managing to cope.