The Shapeless Unease Read online

  Then a week later when the test results come back normal it points towards what I already know, which is that my sleeplessness is psychological. I must carry on being the archaeologist of myself, digging around, seeing if I can excavate the problem and with it the solution – when in truth I am afraid of myself, not of what I might uncover, but of managing to uncover nothing.

  There was once a girl.

  There was once a girl aged something like twelve.

  Had a dog.

  Had a dog.

  A dog of big, bewitching gentleness. Of long black and brown coat and swift speed and big carnivorous teeth and nothing-ever-but-gentleness. A dog caught up in the chaotic tit for tat of divorce.

  It was half term. The girl was visiting her dad, who’d been left with the custody of the dog, or should I say demanded the custody of the dog given that it was the mum’s dog, and he either wanted to keep this living part of her or wanted to punish this living part of her; I don’t know. It was half term and the girl and her sister were staying with the dad for the week.

  The dog didn’t live with the dad, despite his demand for custody, because the dad lived with the new wife, just around the corner, and the new wife didn’t like anything that had anything to do with the old wife. The dog lived in the house that had once, only two or so years before, been a warm, busy home to a family of four: dad, mum, daughter, daughter. Now the house was empty; nobody lived there but the dog and its astonishingly multiplying fleas.

  The dad came each day to feed it, and most days to walk it, but there were at least twenty-three hours in every day that the dog now spent alone. The neighbours complained that it howled most of the day and all of the night – their complaint wasn’t only because of the disturbance to them, but because they were alarmed that a creature should be abandoned in this way. The dad said he’d try to visit the dog more often, but it was difficult, what with a business to run and new wife and new stepchildren and new stepdogs, plus the occasional visitations of old actual children.

  In the school holidays the girl and her sister made the three-hour journey from their mum’s house to visit the dad. This half-term holiday, as with every holiday, when the girl visited, she spent all her time at the old house with the dog. She didn’t feel welcome at the new wife’s house, and didn’t like it anyhow – it smelt of poverty and of urine and of lingering cooked dinners. She walked the dog, she sat for hours stroking the silken patch between the dog’s ears, or the pink, hairless patch on the belly, which the dog loved. She talked at length to the dog about how things were. She tried crushing the fleas between her fingers; she found the best way to kill them was to fill the bathroom sink with water and drown them. She lay down with the dog on the flea-flocked carpet and they slept. When it came to the end of the day and she had to go, she would be bitten from head to foot. It was of no consequence.

  A year of this. This half term, however, was the last of it. The girl had appealed so strongly to her mum, and her mum to her dad, that it was agreed, after a miserable year of this arrangement, that the dog would come to live with the girl, the girl’s sister, and the mum. When the girl and her sister went home on the Sunday, the dog would go with them and they’d all live together, in the mum’s new house.

  This half term the girl had done as always; spent all day every day with the dog, and had told the dog the plan. Told it many times, clearly, plainly, so that the dog would understand that it wasn’t some fancy, some childish wish, but a reality agreed upon. Just as well, because by Wednesday the dog was ill. The girl could see this. It wouldn’t eat, and where it would usually have defied its Alsatian largeness with a balletic, bounding greeting when the girl walked through the door, a bounding of pure joy, it now lifted only its head. Some kind of brokenness of spirit, the girl thought, which would have been tragic if not for the soonness of relief. She told the dog not to worry. She left at the end of that day with reassurances. Not to worry. Not to worry.

  The next day the dog still wouldn’t eat, nor drink. It was listless. Its nose was warm and dry; this was all the girl knew about dog health – if the nose was cool and wet the dog was well, and if the nose was warm and dry it wasn’t. She knew, regardless of the nose, that the dog wasn’t well, but the nose seemed to confirm it as outward proof. She went to the next-door neighbour, since the dad was at work and she didn’t know how to contact him. The neighbour came to look, and called the vet. The vet came. He glanced around the abandoned living room with its fleas, its dust, its cold stale smell, then knelt and administered to the dog with a terrible tenderness that made the girl want to cry. He decided the dog had a kidney infection and should be encouraged to drink as often as possible. He gave the girl some pills to give the dog. Before he left he told the girl, and the neighbour, that the dog should not, under any circumstances, be left alone.

  That night, for the first time, the girl stayed in the house with the dog. Even though it had been her home since birth and the house of all her firsts – first word, first tooth, first day at school, first sighting of imaginary friend, first book independently read – she didn’t like to stay in it any more. With all its furniture in place, its bedrooms laid out for a family of four, its beds still made, the lace tablecloth on the table that belonged to her great-granddad, the mum’s candelabra on top of that, inappropriately grand for the three-bed semi, the horse and cart on the windowsill, the statue of John Wayne on the shelf, the mum’s drawings on the kitchen wall, the dad’s cartoons next to them. Everything was as it had been except untouched. Everything had a film of grime. She was somehow afraid of the house, of going upstairs in the dark. She slept downstairs on the sofa, next to the dog, with her hand on the dog’s back.

  There was no choice, the next day, but for the dad to do what did not come naturally to him, and stand up to his new wife. He insisted that the dog should be allowed into the new wife’s house. The dog was barely moving by now, and when the girl stroked the patch between its ears there was only a twitch of its ears or brows, which seemed to the girl to be small gestures of gratitude, but no longer pleasure. She told it that there were only two more days; the day after tomorrow the dog wouldn’t have to bear this house, it would be going home with her. Just two more days.

  By this time, the girl knew that the dog was dying. If she’d been honest with herself, she’d known it from the very first moment she walked in the house two days before, when the dog didn’t bound. When she saw the dog rise slowly, tail wagging, there’d been a heaviness in her own legs, not a weakness, just a slight heaviness, that was the heaviness of predictability. The knowledge of events to come. It had always been her legs that suffered; there had been strange growing pains for years that had made her temporarily unable to walk, as if anticipating old age, or future grief. She wondered if her legs had known all along, from birth, that her mum would leave, that her dog would be tortured this way and die. Could legs know such things? Well, maybe.

  She didn’t want the dog to go to the new wife’s house. She couldn’t picture it there, with the other scrawny dogs that she and her sister called, unimaginatively, the rats, she couldn’t picture its magnificence in that stale, brown room. But she also did want the dog to go there; she wanted everyone to see that the dog was ill and to understand, when it died, that they’d killed it. The dog crawled behind the new wife’s sofa and lay still. It wouldn’t drink. The vet was called again, and this time when he left, the house was very quiet and even the new wife, who only ever bore the expression of a viper, looked softer and pale.

  On Halloween morning, the Saturday, the dog died. That night the dad’s brother – the girl’s uncle – was having a Halloween party. The new wife didn’t want the dad to go, and the dad, who had wanted to go, had already promised her, sulkily, that he wouldn’t. The girl remembered days when the dad had seemed strong, a giant to her, a man who could leapfrog over a five-foot post.

  The dog’s death took all the air out of the world. Its body was driven to the vet’s and left there; it had probab
ly been in pain for some time, a week or two or three, the vet said. But dogs are resilient; they want to please their owners. The dad cried; the girl had never seen her dad cry before and she both wished that he would stop and wished that he would never stop. Her sister had never been attached to the dog, but she cried briefly before trying, with an expression of faraway torment, to be a comfort, as was her way.

  In the last two years or so, the girl had learned a lot about the way adults treat each other, the blame they have for one another, the blame she felt towards herself for their and her own unhappiness; it had seemed to her that if some of it was her fault then some of it could be fixed by her. That Halloween, she saw the dad blame his new wife for the dog’s death, and saw the new wife blame the dad for caring more about the dog’s death than he did about her. The girl wanted only to be on her own in the old house, the dog’s house as she now saw it, to touch the things the dog had touched, to collect some of its hair from the carpet and take it with her, to sit among its fleas.

  That evening the dad, the girl and her sister went to the Halloween party. Everybody at the party agreed that the dad needed to be there, and each time the new wife phoned, a different person answered to tell her that the dad needed to be there, at his own brother’s party, to be with his family on such a sad day, when he’d had such a tough time of it these last two years, when his wife had left him and the children, left him to cope with two young girls, then eventually the girls had gone too, reappearing in the school holidays for too short a time. Off his girls were going the next day back to their mum’s, poor man having such a rough day, he needed to have some time to spend with them.

  When the dad, the girl and her sister walked back to the new wife’s house that night after the party, with the girl on one side of the staggering dad and the sister on the other, they came to the gate that opened into a small, grassless front garden, and found all of the dad’s things in front of the door and window, from where they had been hurled.

  They walked, the dad now suddenly less staggering, to the old house, went in. The girl didn’t go to the kitchen, where the dog’s untouched water bowl was, and the old towel the dog had used for a bed. It was cold in the house. They went up to the rooms they’d always gone to before – the girl remembering how she’d used to imagine her bed was a rowing boat on a vast night-time sea – and just as they’d used to do in these rooms for all those years, they slept.

  Months ago I had a dream that I was in a high-speed shuttle in a hot narrow tube for an untold time, my satchel pressed to my chest while a voice barked an order not to speak, to ask no questions, to expect nothing. I was sardined with a hundred unknown others whose fear formed a film of sweat on the ceiling of our tube, and there was a certain wobble to our hurtle, a sense that the space we flew through wasn’t the effortless path to a better place but a thrust into grit, beyond which – what? Who could say?

  I woke up and thought, Thank god that was a dream. A moment later, What if that was a glimpse of death?

  I couldn’t shake the feeling off. Months later, I still can’t shake the feeling off.

  I call my mother and say, Comfort me, protect me from this outcome. She says, Death is beautiful, I know it, don’t worry. I say, How do you know, you don’t know. She says, I just know.

  3 a.m.:

  The long trail of the freight train snags the night. Something has been torn (how apt, that phrase, ‘morning has broken’) – it won’t be mended now until night falls again. From here there will be more freight trains, then the first flight passing overhead at around four, and at five or five thirty the traffic will start up, and from there our hyperactive little planet will flare once more to life. At three, the first ember has already taken. In reality, for those awake enough to register it, there is about an hour of night at most – somewhere between two and three, a brief lull between one day dwindling and the next awakening.

  I get up. Current wisdom is conflicted on this. Some sleep regimes say you should get up if you’re still awake after twenty minutes, so that you don’t associate bed with sleeplessness. Others say you should stay in bed regardless, so that you don’t signal to the body that it’s normal to be up in the night; instead you stay in bed and accept what comes.

  Inherently inert at night, and clinging on to some idea of myself as a good sleeper, I’m much more predisposed to the latter. Tonight, though, I get up. I’m restless. I make a cup of tea. Absolutely no sleep regimes advocate having a caffeinated drink at 3 a.m. but I did it once and went straight to sleep afterwards, so occasionally I try it just in case it works again, which it never has.

  There’s a line from a Philip Larkin poem that comes to me. I don’t know the poem first-hand, I found it in a book about poetry I’ve recently read – something about a million-petalled flower. Sitting on the sofa in my underwear, drinking tea, I do the other thing no sleep regime advocates – I go online. There is the poem, in which Larkin remarks on the oblivion of death. It is ‘only oblivion’, he says:

  We had it before, but then it was going to end,

  And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour

  To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower

  Of being here.

  It feels like a bell ringing distantly, like the heralding of company in what you thought was a desert or an abyss. Suddenly I don’t feel lonely, I feel elated, and everything is soft and full of echoes and resonance. Then I think of a line from another poem by Jack Underwood, that describes the elation of holding a newborn baby: ‘I can feel my socks being on’ he writes. And when I read it I can feel my socks being on, even if I’m not wearing any. Poetry can turn phrases that rotate the world, too small a rotation to cause a public commotion but enough to knock a solitary life a fraction off its axis, such that it will never quite be the same again. It’s that turn of phrase – ‘the million-petalled flower of being here’ – that knocks my axis now. After years of labouring over Buddhist, Hindu, Christian teachings that try to get me to some finishing line of selfhood, this phrase of Larkin’s is a steroid straight to the veins. I’ve sprinted past my old labouring self and have arrived at the finishing line, which of course doesn’t exist, which turns out to be an ever-replenishing starting point. My life, all life, opens out in accelerated footage of growth. It doesn’t feel like it could ever stop, and that’s the trick of life – it seems so abundant, and even while we’re watching it die all around us it’s whispering in our ears sweet-nothings of plenitude.

  At around half past three I go back to bed. To have come this far through the night and feel in some way peaceful is surely an augur for sleep. Also, I’m cold. Getting into bed, nestling down, there are a few minutes of contentment that remind me of how it always used to be. I used to love going to bed. Remember that now. My life, so convoluted and iterative and searching, is nothing more complex or more simple than the million-petalled flower of being here. I am alive, I think, as if I’ve just discovered an extraordinary fact. I can feel my life being on.

  Here: my mother. Singing along to ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ as she does the housework. Polishing her silver candelabra and the matching silver goblets. Me, small, listening.

  Round, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning in an ever-spinning reel.

  Something in my brain responding to the words whose collective meaning I couldn’t comprehend, but following the repetitions and the melody as if along a path corkscrewing around a mountain. The living room would turn strange. I’d load up the wooden cart with marbles, adjust the bridle of the china Shire horse – this was the ornamental horse and cart everyone had in the 80s – and tsk tsk the horse on. Off to market! My mum’s singing in the background would give rise to random images. Water swirling down a drain. Bedtimes. The willow tree. The woods we walked in. Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own. The melody of that song going nowhere, a pendulum rocking back and forth, back and forth. The china horse trundling across our light green carpe
t.

  Think of a sentence:

  One day I’d like to write a story about a man who, while robbing a cash machine, loses his wedding ring and has to go back for it because his wife, a terrifying individual whose material needs have driven him to crime, will no doubt kill him if the ring is lost.

  A sentence with multiple clauses, one clause buried within another like Russian dolls. If we take each doll out and line them up we get:

  One day I’d like to write a story.

  The story is about a man.

  A man robs a cash machine.

  A man loses his wedding ring.

  A man goes back to the cash machine for his wedding ring.

  A man has a wife.

  The wife is terrifying.

  The wife has many material needs.

  The man is driven to crime by his wife.

  The ring must not get lost.

  The wife could kill the man.

  We tend to speak in sentences of multiple clauses, not in clauses that have been separated out. Noam Chomsky has called these multiple clauses instances of recursion, and he thinks they’re what define human language. They reflect our unique ability to position a thought inside a thought, to move from the immediate to the abstract, to infinite other places and times. A circle in a spiral, a wheel within a wheel; a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own. In theory, an infinitely long, recursive sentence is possible, says Chomsky; there is no limit to the mind’s capacity to embed one thought inside another. Our language is recursive because our minds are recursive. Infinitely windmilling.