The Shapeless Unease Read online

  This feeling, she reports, was reinforced by the fact that, at night, she felt increasingly feral, like a wild animal enduring a cage, and would pace, make sounds of obvious distress and pull at her hair, behaviour that didn’t seem to come from her conscious being, but from a wild part of herself below or beyond consciousness. Yet by day, although exhausted and subdued, she continued to function at a relatively normal – if much reduced – capacity, with intact levels of reason and perspective, much reduced (although not no) anger, and no desire to hit her head or cause any harm to herself or others.

  She reports that she did not understand where the wildness came from at night, nor where it went by day. She reports being terrified of it, yet at times wishing for it to take over, and describes powerful, yearning imaginings of being admitted to hospital and drugged, or of having suffered a complete and debilitating breakdown and being surrounded by loved ones. In this scene she reports that she cannot see herself at all, so surrounded she is by those carers, and nor does she have any autonomy, needs or wishes, so subsumed is her being, she says, by the overwhelming force of their care.

  Dear Cousin Paul,

  I write without flippancy. I write to tell you what Google tells me you should expect from your first days, weeks and months of death. I write to try to guard you from disappointments surrounding your fate. I wish only that you could write back.

  A corpse in a coffin underground will take half a century to rot down to dust (good news? I felt this was somewhat good news). The femur so relied upon by you until a few days ago, when you went for that bike ride, will fight the good fight underground and resist the dissolution of its lovely tree-trunk shaft, its gentle rooted knee-splay; it’ll hold on to its subtle curve even when the marrow is shot and the bone snappable. With nothing to snap it, it’ll lie in blackness like a fading X-ray, disintegrating, yes, of course disintegrating, but still there, the persistence of your material being. For a whole fifty years.

  Yet – your face. Your face with the scar tissue spread across your cheek; that little bit where your upper lip folds in a tiny neatness to form the bridge between nostrils, and that nice thing that happens when you look up suddenly, in curiosity, and years blur and you look like you did when you were a child. Your face and its billion moments of life will collapse and rot, and within a few weeks the corpse will be hard to recognise as you.

  Even before you were buried your organs will have started to decay; almost straight away that’ll have happened, when you were still on your bed, during those days before you were found. Autolysis: self-digestion. The bacteria in your gut will have begun to eat dead cells, and a greenish stain will have appeared on your abdomen. Then these bacteria spread to the stomach, to the chest, the thighs, the legs—

  What an unlikely wonder is life, that it holds in itself the whole wildness of death – those bacteria didn’t come into life at the point of death, they were always there and they always wanted to eat you, and your cells always contained in them the enzymes that would assist your rotting. It was only ever your vehemence to survive that prevented all that. Did you know, were you ever able to detect within, the passionate warfare that kept you here?

  And then the war is fought and finished, and the process of unexisting you begins. Bacteria swarm through you, and as they digest you they let off gases that make you rise like dough, and on your third or fourth day of death you’re beginning to smell, and you’re a vibrant, moving mass of activity. Methane, odours, swelling, morphing, the escaping of your tongue from your mouth, fluids through your nose, your intestines through your rectum, a blooming, a slow-motion explosion, the busyness of life’s oldest, most efficient and venerable clean-up operation.

  What improbable teamwork, a tireless, Disney-like vigour. Vish-vash-vosh, aye-oh, aye-oh, the optimism and synchronicity of a midget army, a dash of vanishing-dust, a choral song of death, a transformation, and Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, lo-and-behold, the fingers that had not long been blue begin a creeping shift to something blacker, and the explosion ceases with the same slow order in which it began, and the gases are ebbing, and the body collapses, a climax reached, a slackening of flesh, the first troops withdraw, we are here at the next stage after only fifteen or so days of death if we’re not yet embalmed: black putrefaction. The flesh turns creamy against patches of bruising, the body lies in a pool of fluid, the predatory beetles come, the maggots, the parasitoid wasps—

  But you’re embalmed, so, fifteen days in, this isn’t happening to you. My dear cousin, not yet. You’re safe in the eternal night of your coffin, away from (unable ever to return to) everyone you ever loved, with your skull sawn in half.

  Cousin Paul, cousin Paul.

  At the bottom of the webpage that’s telling me all this about your inevitable descent into black putrefaction, it says:

  If you are struggling, consider online therapy with BetterHelp.

  You are worth it!

  ‘Let me explain about the sleep cycle. Do you know about the sleep cycle?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’ll draw a diagram.’

  ‘I just feel so—’

  ‘Anxious.’

  ‘And angry.’

  ‘Anger is no use when we want to sleep.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Let’s say this circle represents a full sleep cycle. The whole cycle takes about ninety minutes and a good sleeper will have around five of these cycles a night. This segment here is called Stage 1, and it’s what we call light sleep – then comes Stage 2, which we call intermediate sleep. Making sense? Now, overall, this is the longest stage and most of the night will be spent here. It’s very restful and this sleep is nice and refreshing for the body, but it isn’t the most restorative phase. The most restorative is Stage 3, deep sleep. When you’re in this phase your heart rate falls and you won’t wake up unless something or somebody disturbs you, and even then it will be difficult to wake you. In the first two or so sleep cycles this stage will last around half an hour, but with each cycle it becomes shorter, so that you spend less time there. All OK so far? Then comes this stage, which we call REM sleep, Stage 4. This is where we dream, and it’s kind of opposite to the deep-sleep phase. Our heart rate quickens, and with each cycle this phase gets longer. At first it’s just ten minutes or so, but in the last one or two cycles it’ll last around half an hour. Then we’re all the way back round to Stage 1 again – light sleep, almost awake. We might wake up in this stage, in the middle of the night. We often do. That’s natural and normal even for a good sleeper. And then the cycle begins again.’

  ‘_’

  ‘We want to get you having some nice, full sleep cycles, and a bit more of that deep-sleep phase.’

  ‘The thing is, there’s so much that’s not right, so much suffering. My sister, my dad, my stepmum, I want to support them but I’m so knackered from not sleeping, I can barely function. I worry. About everything. About my family, about not sleeping. I’ve stopped writing. I go in to the university and teach with zero hours’ sleep, I sit there and start a sentence and have no idea what word will come next or how I’ll find my way to the end of it. I can feel my skin. It’s too tight.’

  ‘Is lack of sleep affecting your mental health, would you say?’

  ‘I’m desperate, I want to know that it’s going to end. I want to be there for my family. I could cope with it if I knew it would end, if somebody could reassure me.’

  ‘I’m not going to reassure you. This isn’t about a sticking plaster, this is about helping you change your behaviour and your thoughts.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with my behaviour and thoughts.’

  ‘That’s what we’re here to find out.’

  ‘I never needed to have the right thought before, I slept, I didn’t need special sleeping thoughts.’

  ‘You need to believe that you can sleep again.’

  ‘Since when was sleep a matter of faith?’

  ‘You need to try to change your negativity into positivity.’r />
  ‘I just want to be reassured.’

  ‘We can easily get stuck in a “yes, but” pattern. Whenever help is offered, the response is “yes, but”. It’s about moving away from that. Having a “yes” mentality, not a “yes, but” one.’

  ‘Yes.’

  But – you try having a positive mental attitude when you’ve had five hours’ sleep in three nights. You try.

  I lie in bed repeating the word for hours. Yesyesyesyes yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes yesyesyesyesyesyes.

  What does Y E S spell?

  Yes.

  What does E Y E S spell?

  E-yes.

  Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes.

  Eyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyes.

  Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes.

  Eyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyes.

  Closeyoureyescloseyoureyescloseyoureyesclose youreyes.

  Close you’re yes.

  Close you are, yes.

  Yes.

  Yes?

  Dust and ashes though I am, I sleep the sleep of angels.

  This is the first line of my most recently published novel. I don’t know the person who wrote that line. The person who wrote it didn’t know anything. She didn’t know the first thing about anything.

  Dust and ashes though I am are not even her words; they are the first words of St Augustine’s Confessions of a Sinner. I sleep the sleep of angels are her words, but she knows nothing of angels and knew nothing then about sleep (in the way fish know nothing about water), she was just hazarding guesses, she was as green as a shoot.

  But my sleep was ragged that night, she wrote. But she didn’t know anything about ragged sleep when she wrote that. She knew the word ragged and she knew it was an adjective that could describe many things, including sleep, but she knew nothing about ragged sleep. Nowadays she is shocked by the fraudulence of words. Every word claims an authority and every word craves to be believed, and we read others’ words and we find something to relate to, solace in a shared experience. Yet there doesn’t have to be any experience behind a word. A word can be a shadow not cast by any object.

  Lately, whenever I read that someone in a novel is having trouble sleeping my heart lurches forward to unite first with them, and then with their author, as if the ability to write the words guarantees a knowledge of the words written. Yet a word is just a collection of letters attached to an idea. The idea doesn’t have to be attached to anything in the world. You can be rich in words and poor in experience, and you can spend, spend, spend, and somehow make that your living.

  My sleep was ragged that night, wrote our little fraudster. Much is said to disparage authors who write outside of their expertise, and worse still, who appropriate the experience of others about whom they cannot know – a white man appropriating the experience of a Bangladeshi woman, a childless woman that of a mother – but nobody took the pen from my hand when I, well-slept, found a notion in my brain of sleeplessness. To write fiction you have to engage in organised fraud, the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words.

  Our little fraudster had a thousand more words than she had experiences; she was compelled to lie. Believe nothing she says. A word can be a little piece of inheritance. It can be spent without ever having been earned.

  1 a.m.:

  Lie here then. Just lie here. What of it? It’s just lying here. Think of good things.

  The sky in France – so vast, so black, so star-spangled that when we got out of the car our gazes were pulled up to it, both of us at once, and we stood silently gaping. The Milky Way was a wide, distinct bow flexed above us and the stars – staggering in their numbers – did in fact twinkle.

  The sunsets in France, a roaring red horizon and the hazy moon above, like a moth smoked out of a fire; Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all visible at once. Bats pouring out of the ruined tower of the medieval chateau, swooping above our heads and pouring in again. The fading call of crickets. My swimming costume hanging on the balcony railings going loose with chlorine and overuse, loose with two months of swimming.

  I think about the swimming. I have a shell brought back for me from Oman, a conch that is smooth and white and fits well in the palm, and I’ve taken to holding it at night. Every now and then I’ll let go of it long enough for it to become cold again. Think about the swimming, going up and down the pool following the lining seam. My underwater slipstream, my hands ageless and bright. Count your blessings. Lying here, thinking of the sunsets and swimming and the planets and stars, what is there to be afraid of? Try to calm the banging heart.

  There’s something called ‘nocturnal forgiveness’, which is the act of letting go of all wrongs and all guilt or blame, just for the duration of the night. You leave them outside the room. I forgive everything I can think of one by one – the cars driving past too fast, the jackdaws for ransacking the bird feeder, the universe for torturing me, myself for torturing me. What I suddenly think of is my dad plaiting my hair when I was nine years old, in the first few weeks after my mum left. Plaiting my hair with his huge, scarred, leathery builder’s hands.

  It’s half past one, quarter to two. I’m trying to collect plums that have fallen from a tree onto the floor of a restaurant, burgundy plums, very ripe, some trodden in. Simultaneous to this comes the knowledge that I must be dreaming and therefore partly asleep, and with the realisation of this I have the swiftest moment of triumph – I’m asleep! – before waking up.

  I don’t look at a clock in the night but I’ve spent so many nights awake that I usually know the time within around ten or twenty minutes; I know the texture of the passing hours and the texture of my thoughts as the night abrades them. Around now they begin to show signs of wear. The little calm persuasions become frustrations. The forgiveness becomes laughable, and all the forgiven things that should be outside the room are in fact hovering about by my bed half-satisfied as if there’s something else they need from me.

  I want to go back to that dream of the plums. I open my eyes wide and close them in the hope that it’ll trick them into heaviness. At least I had a dream of plums, it means I went to sleep; that’s good. But five, six minutes’ sleep. That’s not good. Who can survive on six minutes of sleep? How can I?

  I let the shell drop. Frustration and anger. But there’s no use being angry, no use. Think of Venus and the Milky Way and of all the space, all the space in the world, the universe, our bodies, our minds. Everything is made up of space and is more space than it is form. Think about that – you too are more space than you are body. Think about the sky when you look up at night – you see stars, but really what you see is the immense nothingness between stars, and you see how nothingness is the condition for somethingness, how greedy every object is to claim its own arena of space.

  Try smiling. Smiling strongly cues to the brain that everything is OK, and brings happiness. Lie here and smile; Venus, the Milky Way, the moon, the bats, the pool, the fathomless repository of a lifetime’s memories, the warmth of the bed. Smile. Absurd little row of teeth in the darkness.

  Take heart, says something tenacious and laudable – there’s still a ten per cent chance you’ll sleep, and if you sleep now you can still have five or six hours – plenty. A veritable richness of sleep.

  A moment later it revises its estimation down. Six per cent, seven at the most. But that’s based on past experience and probability doesn’t work like that; every roll of the dice brings equal odds. Throwing four once doesn’t lessen the odds of throwing four again, or a hundred times in a row. Every night is a fresh night and a fresh roll of the dice.

  In the darkness I fumble again for my conch; it’s said that blowing a conch creates a beautiful sound that sees off negative spirits, and I pass my thumb over the blowing end, and bring it to my lips. No sound. Just a salty taste that has no right to be there after so many years of being landlocked at my bedside.

  I lie on my front. Maybe I can smuggle sleep in this way, by assuming a position that I
never sleep in. Maybe sleep can sneak in before my mind realises what’s happening. Maybe I can squash my thrumming heart down to forty beats per minute. I lie in this way for half an hour. Maybe the night won’t notice me. Maybe, maybe. Venus, the Milky Way, a plum tree, the mattress, the bats, my bright underwater hands, an aching neck, the lurch of falling asleep, and with the lurch, waking up.

  It’s well past two. A freight train passes.

  The night of my cousin’s funeral I’m in a service station café that’s soon to close and has a worshipful hush. There’s the whirr of a floor cleaner and the metal ting of spatula on catering tray. There’s me by the wall of black window and there’s me again in the wall of black window; me, and reflection-me.

  Reflection-me feeds macaroni cheese into her reflection-mouth, none of which exist – the body, the macaroni cheese, the mouth.

  The reflection-body is suspended far away in a thingless black. I ignore it, too hungry. Who knew so firm and buttery a carrot existed on or near a motorway? But then, why has it taken this long? Man has sent a space probe into the rings of Saturn, man has built an underground machine that speeds particles at 299.8 million metres a second to recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang. How could it be only now, in 2018, that a well-cooked carrot has arrived in a service station?

  The ghost of me that’s floating afield somewhere in the depthless world of reflection is never hungry or full, and has not suffered from weeks without sleep, and doesn’t know I’ve mugged the day to get these thirty minutes for myself between worlds. It doesn’t know this dull sense of grief, or this horror when I think: I’m eating macaroni cheese while my cousin, with whom I ran around our grandparents’ garden, is buried underground.