The Shapeless Unease Read online

  Yet I’m warm and calm. I don’t want to go home – home is a bed I’m no longer able to sleep in. I don’t want to go back – back is my dead cousin. I want to stay; this plastic chair in a vast quiet café by a vast black window feels like the place I’ve always been looking for.

  The day’s almost done. There’s a pair of men over there finishing up some food, there’s a man cleaning the floor, there’s a retired-looking couple and a woman at the canteen taking out the scraped trays of shepherd’s pie and lasagne. You’re all going to die, I think. Compassion surges in me. Can’t swallow for the closing up of my throat. You might be taking your fork to a plate of shepherd’s pie now, but you, like me, are going to die, and here are the only words I can submit to you:

  In the midst of life we are in death.

  In the midst of the service station we are in death.

  In the midst of the service station we are in life.

  In the midst of death we are in the service station.

  In the midst of death we are – we are. We are.

  Some clarifications:

  When I don’t sleep, which is very often, I don’t sleep at all. It’s not so much that I’m a bad sleeper these days, it’s that I’m a non-sleeper. I am a bad sleeper too, but nights of bad sleep are the good nights, because they involve sleep.

  When I don’t sleep, it’s not that I feel tired so much as assaulted. In the morning after a night of no sleep my eyes are sore and tender and can barely open. My joints ache. There’s a taste in my mouth which isn’t like any other taste, only like a feeling, and that feeling is defeat. My skull aches evenly across its hemisphere. Pain shoots up to some old scars on the crown of my head. I eye the world with suspicion and everything in it seems to stand back from me with hostility and hatred. There’s a force at work that doesn’t wish for my wellbeing; it feels personal.

  I go up to bed at night, I get beaten up, I come downstairs in the morning. Then I go about the day as if things were normal and I hadn’t been beaten up, and everyone else treats me as if I hadn’t been beaten up, and that way I survive, but no more than that. If somebody willed your destruction they could do it this way, by taking away your sleep. Of course, it’s tried and tested.

  I come down late one morning while staying with friends in France. I feel like my face is bruised and that my appearance will appal them, that they’ll hide me from their small child. Instead my friend looks at me with infinite compassion and says, Une petite nuit? Oui, I say, une petite nuit, encore. In this expression, French has it all wrong; nights awake are the longest, largest, most cavernous of things. There is acre upon acre of night, and whole eras come and go, and there isn’t another soul to be found on the journey through to morning.

  When I don’t sleep I spend the night searching the intricacies of my past, trying to find out where I went wrong, trawling through childhood to see if the genesis of the insomnia is there, trying to find the exact thought, thing or happening that turned me from a sleeper to a non-sleeper. I try to find a key to release me from it. I try to solve the logic problem that is now my life. I circle the arena of my mind, its shrinking perimeter, like a polar bear in its grubby blue-white plastic enclosure with fake ice caps and water that turns out to have no depth. I circle and circle. It’s 3 a.m., 4 a.m. It’s always 3 a.m., 4 a.m. I circle back.

  When I don’t sleep the world becomes profoundly unsafe. If food were withdrawn, or water, you would feel unsafe; if withdrawn often enough – not long enough to kill you, but often enough to diminish you – you would begin to wonder what the point of life was, if all it does is threaten you with scarcity. There’s terror when a basic animal need isn’t met. At first you fear death, then a worse thing happens – you fear life. You no longer want your life, not on these terms. When I don’t sleep and don’t sleep and don’t sleep, I don’t want my life; neither do I have in me the propulsion (courage? know-how?) to take it. So I have to endure my life when it’s unendurable, and this is an impasse.

  When I don’t sleep I lie still for several hours with my heart pounding, as if evading some beast; when the adrenaline has built in me I break and I get up and hit things, the wall, my head, my head against the wall. I might howl, I might scream. I’ll pace, pace, as if trying to stalk down an old, better self that has outrun me.

  When I used to sleep I understood nothing about any of this. I knew nothing about what it takes to get through what can’t be got through. At night, I’m thrown to the wolves. I only survive by howling like a wolf. This must be true of so many people. Now I know more about that look you see in people’s eyes – that homeless man near the bike racks for example, who is slumped every day in faded black clothes on a small luggage trolley, and who in all truth looks like a bin bag, as if he’s personified his own absolute sense of redundancy and wastage. If you are being trashed by the machinations of a heedless world, disguise yourself as a bin bag; if you’re being savaged by wolves, disguise yourself as a wolf. It’s a way of hiding in plain sight.

  Sometimes I give him money, which he never asks for, and he watches it fall into the cup by his feet with disinterest. Some days I can’t look at him because of that empty gaze when my fifty pence leaves my hand, which seems to say that the days of being helped by money are long gone for him. He’s a creature alone; the days of being helped at all are long gone. He’s not sitting there because he wants to collect money. He’s sitting there because a man’s got to be somewhere, because he can’t be nowhere. There are days I feel so tired and offended by life that I don’t give him money, I don’t want to look at him, I wish he’d just disappear, or hurry up and die. The wolf in me wants to attack him for bothering to survive. Why be alive like this? Why can’t he just let go, I think. Why can’t he just let go?

  Maybe it’s the menopause, my friend says.

  Could it be, already?

  Women do stop sleeping well when they hit the menopause.

  How do you know if you have?

  My friend says to ask my doctor. At the doctor’s I sit like a child, with my hands in a loose prayer between my thighs, and my ankles crossed. I always feel like a child the instant I sit before a doctor, and in this case my sense of being one makes it all the more incongruous when I ask about the menopause. I feel flushed and embarrassed to even speak the word, which seems suddenly to designate a club, a band of sisters, a band of mothers, that I’m trying to force my way into.

  The doctor says as much. Do you have any other signs of menopause? she asks. Hot flushes, cold night sweats, are your periods still regular?

  She says I don’t sleep because I’m anxious, and draws attention to my anxiety score derived from a form I filled in.

  My body feels suddenly shameful – too old and too young at once, too old to be sitting with this fearful deference to authority and too young to suppose the menopause might be accounting for my troubles. My troubles are just my troubles; I should not try to dignify them with a stage of life, a rite of womanhood. The doctor, herself a woman who must have been through the menopause and presumably carried it off with resilience and not a day’s absence from work, is sitting in a posture that mirrors mine – hands between thighs, leaning slightly forward – except in her it’s motherly and chastening. It’s that forward lean, which says, now, no more silliness. It’s a primitive tactic for advancing subtly into another’s space, just enough that they know who dominates. It feels more combative than it needs to, since my own posture clearly shows I know who dominates. Though of course, that’s why it’s combative, because my diffidence has provided something to combat. I straighten up and let my hands rest loose on top of my thighs, not between them. They’re still linked, though. I would rather unlink them but they won’t.

  There’s not much point in running tests, she says, when I suggest it. They don’t show a great deal; hormones are in too much flux and subject to too many variables for a test to be of much use. A test is a snapshot of a biological moment, not an assessment of a state of being.

  So
there’s no way of knowing if my sleep problems could be hormonal, I say, and she says it wouldn’t do any good to know in any case since not much can be done, the menopause is something that has to be (she pauses) experienced.

  Her choice of word sits oddly between us – not endured or suffered or managed, but experienced, as if it’s experience I don’t want. It’s not suffering I’ve come here about, it’s not that I want to alleviate some suffering but that I want her to make me stop having experiences. In that word is the very sum of her chastening, again, as you would a child: you want the world to be simple, fair and free of all difficulty, but the world isn’t that way and the sooner you recognise that I can’t immunise you to your own life – the sooner you grow up – the better.

  This is surely something women get more than men – this message that they need to learn to put up with things. I read somewhere that women are far more likely to be told by a doctor that their symptoms are stress, while men’s symptoms will be investigated and more often referred. By stress, it’s meant that women are complicating and compounding their experiences in a way that could be avoidable if only they did breathing and gratitude exercises and stopped being surprised by the inevitabilities of their lives – the feelings of premenstrual rage, the loss of pelvic floor muscles in pregnancy, the loss of bowel control in childbirth, the loss of sleep in menopause, the subjection to various and subtly ubiquitous inequalities and injustices that affect every corner of their lives, the subsuming of oneself in the role of daughterhood to the point that the sense of self becomes so vague as to be virtually derelict and not a self at all, only a roughly amassed set of duties and culpabilities and failures, fought off temporarily by the role of motherhood and all its attendant power, only to return redoubled as the self is once again and spectacularly and irrevocably subsumed by the life of the child, an obliteration not only expected by society, but revered.

  The doctor asks me if there’s anything else; in doing so she’s leaned further forward and is smiling in a way that illustrates how unanimous we are at this point in our conversation, a smile that therefore suggests closure.

  If I knew the cause was menopausal I could at least stop looking for other causes, I say. What I mean is I could stop investing my money and time in trying to excavate my being for some emotional artefact that would serve as a clue as to the nature of my self, and in that excavation, painful and invasive as it is, come to a bedrock, the bedrock on which all my fears and neuroses lie, and somehow (in ways I didn’t yet understand, but would hopefully come to understand) smash through that bedrock, thereby letting the whole tower of my egoic and troubled self fall through, taking with it my weaknesses, shortcomings, terrors and unhelpful tendencies, among them my insomnia. I don’t say any of this to her, only feel there’s something in my character that wants in this moment to collapse, something that is asked to exercise the power of an adult and can’t. There’s only this strange reversion to the powerless panic of childhood – maybe that’s one of the artefacts I’m supposed to scrape out from the earth. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I don’t sleep?

  Have you thought about counselling? the doctor asks.

  I tell her I’ve been seeing a counsellor.

  And do you think that’s a good thing to do?

  Good in what way, I want to ask. Good as in wholesome, or as in useful, or as in morally right, the only morally right thing a person can do when they’re meanwhile burdening the NHS with their ailments, ailments which originate in the mind? Whichever, I know that the right answer is yes. She wants me to say yes so that I inadvertently admit that my sleeping problems are psychological, not as such biological, and therefore my own responsibility and not hers.

  Yes, I say.

  Good. So you’ll carry on with it?

  Why is it – she’s thinking – that she has to sit there day after day listening to patients who refuse to take responsibility for their own wellbeing? Why does everyone want a test, a diagnosis, a pill? They want her to wave the magic wand, and it isn’t only that she has no wand but that there’s no magic in medicine and never was. The days of miraculous cures are gone – she’s thinking – or at least her days in believing in them are gone, and now what is she but an agony aunt and a drug dealer. Half of her time is spent not on diagnosing and treating primary illnesses, but on treating all the illnesses caused by side effects of the drugs she’s prescribed. She has become a doctor of side effects, treated with more drugs that create more side effects.

  Some of it can’t be helped – the human body is perishable, medicine imperfect. But then there are all these people who should never have let themselves get to the point of needing medicine, whose problems were preventable and who now want her to take an action that will compensate for the actions they didn’t take themselves. People in Syria can sleep with bombs falling, why can’t you sleep on your king-size mattress with your winter-togged duvet and your kelp-scented hair on a fake-down pillow under a bomb-free sky? What pea disrupts your sleep, princess? A passing Audi? What paucity and fragility of spirit has left you relying on drugs to do that which is the natural inheritance of all animals everywhere and forever? But prescribe drugs she must, because that’s what they want. People are rattling with drugs, you can hear it when they walk in. Maybe they don’t even want to get better, they’ve got used to the sad prestige of being unwell. They want her to both acknowledge how magnificently, uniquely unwell they are and to reassure them that despite this they won’t have undue pain and won’t die.

  I’ve told her yes, I’ll carry on with the counselling, and will meditate every day and try more relaxation techniques at bedtime, and while I’m speaking she’s gazing at the computer screen, then turns back to me and cocks her head.

  No catastrophising, she says softly.

  No catastrophising, I say.

  I’m not sure now if I feel like a child or a person standing in front of a magistrate in a district court, someone promising to change her ways and be a good citizen and stop being a burden on society. The child is meek and innocent, the person in court meek and guilty. I can’t decide which I am.

  The doctor seems pleased in a muted way. I want to tell her that the counselling, meditation and relaxation techniques that I already do, every day, aren’t improving my sleep and are increasing my sense of failure, since now I not only fail at sleeping but also at meditating, relaxing and being counselled. I look out of the tall sash window and across the gardens, river, railway line and canal to the hills beyond, and see the huge Georgian building that I used to live in, on that hill. Thinking about myself there is like reading a lifestyle magazine article about another person, someone you’re supposed to admire.

  I do admire her, but more for being young than for any particular achievement, and it strikes me that nothing I’ve ever done was an achievement as such, it was just an outcome of a set of conditions that made me who I was but weren’t of my doing. Being young, sleeping well, charged with ambitious energy – none of that was of my doing, just as being middle-aged and sleeping badly and finding the act of novel writing pointless is none of my doing. It feels a relief to realise this. I want to ask the doctor how she feels about being a woman of her age, about the loss of beauty and of the power of beauty – though you can’t ask somebody a question like that for fear of offence. You would have to qualify that by beauty you mean obvious, youthful beauty, and that there are other types; you’d then have to explain that you do think they have that other type. In the doctor’s case, she does. Her back is exceptionally upright, her head carried with elegance, her hair pulled back in the same kind of ponytail she might have had when she was ten; she has a sleepiness about her but also the carriage of her back makes her seem very alert, and it’s the incongruity of those two things that make her striking.

  If you want I can offer you a blood test, she says, and it’s an assertion and concession of power at once – to offer the very thing someone asked for and which you’d previously withheld, and to offer it because it’
s a gift you’ve finally decided to give, a pointless gift you will give, not because you must, but because you can.

  I say yes, please, I do want. By now – and somehow as a result of looking out of the window and considering my old self in that grand rented flat – I’ve come to a place of almost certain recognition that there’s no dawning of menopause in me, not yet, or that if there is it isn’t the cause of my sleeplessness. I’ve never felt it was, I only came to the doctor about it because my friend said so – and not just my friend, several people, so that it felt negligent and churlish of me not to at least ask. Now I’ve asked, and the asking of the question has also been the negation of it. It’s as if I’ve had to beg to be considered for membership of a club I don’t want to join, and in the begging I’ve seen that all I want is reassurance that there’s no need to beg.

  I dread the idea of being menopausal. I dread the passage into this last phase of life. There’s a vivid image of myself as a twelve year old getting my first period in the childhood home of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, in Stratford, while a guide explained the origin of the phrase ‘turning the tables’. Menopause feels like a betrayal of that girl, though I’m not sure why. Maybe because I haven’t had children, and so the process that began that day has never fulfilled itself, and maybe for that reason I’ll never meet my menopause and old age with a great level of acceptance; there will always be a feeling of unfinished business.

  Still, I say yes to the blood test, since it’s what I came here asking for. This mysterious and autonomous shifting of hormones is a kind of inner ghost-life that’s been at work in me all my life, and I have a longing now to get a glimpse of it. I look out of that tall window again. All I ever seem to feel these days is the disappearance of who I think I am. I would like to see myself, even if it’s only a snapshot that diagnoses nothing; I don’t, in fact, care at all for a diagnosis any more. And when, a fortnight later, I see the tube full of my burgundy blood, there’s an unexpected surge of some feeling I can’t identify. I’m moved by it. It feels idiotic to be moved by a tube of your own blood, yet I am – moved by and possessive of it.