The Shapeless Unease Read online

  Just before dusk we’ll drive up into a nature reserve that boasts good murmurations. We’ll wait for two hours in the merciless grey of midwinter and see a blue tit and two woodpeckers. Then it’ll get dark and we’ll go home. Not home, but home so to speak.

  We’ll work; we’ll vanish each into our screen-worlds, we’ll surface to put a log on the fire, we’ll turn the heating up, we’ll feel bad and turn it down, we’ll listen to the logs hiss damply, we’ll turn the heating back up. Off to the shop: some bad bread and more matches. A Guardian to get the flames going. We’ll investigate the upturned boat in the garden, an altar to someone’s little gods. Shells, stones, plastic figures, a length of rope, incense holders. We’ll argue over a bird. Bullfinch. No way, chaffinch. Bullfinch. Not pink enough. Female one. Chaffinch. Bullfinch. Chaffinch. You’re deluded. Whatever. We’ll play blackjack without speaking. You’ll win, you’ll win, you’ll win, I’ll win, you’ll win.

  We’ll go to bed, we’ll choose which room. This night this one, that night that. We’ll lie in perfect darkness. The darkness is perfect, we’ll say. Yes, perfect. We won’t give a thought to the number 3 bus that’s going at this moment past our bedroom at home. We won’t give a thought to the planes, the trains, the hum of our neighbour’s boiler.

  We’ll wonder why the hurtling of the wind and the hammering of the rain feel like silence. Sometimes – bad nights – we’ll be up, 3 a.m., 4 a.m., battling off the demons. My fucking father, I’ll say, in the grip of a sudden unbidden memory. He killed my dog. He drove my mother away and he killed my dog. Then we’ll watch while the blackness and silence swallow the rage. Forgiveness will come, it always does – of my dad, of the past, because it’s easier to live reconciled to your life than to be counting the losses. We’ll look out of the window at the beautiful never-ending rain, the smell of sanded wood, the generous dark of dawn, the struggle of the stream. We’ll wonder why it feels more like home than home. Why lying awake here brings memories of being a child. Why lying awake has its own grace. Why sleep is deeper and dreamless when it comes.

  We’ll pack up the car. We’ll shove everything around the untouched bikes. Next time, we’ll say, about the wetsuits. We’ll leave first thing, before it’s light, before the robins and bullfinches and whatevers are up. We’ll drive the long way, to see the sea one more time; we’ll wonder what it is about the sea. Then we’ll press home, fast as we can to beat the traffic, we’ll put music on and sing quietly along. The only music in the car is from the 90s, from the age of CDs, dated music which we’ll pretend to listen to ironically. We’ll each kid ourselves, privately, that we’re back there in the past, in all our various near-far pasts. We’ll watch the wipers chop-chop-chopping back the rain. Endless rain, we’ll sing, endless rain.

  Proliferations of love. Vows and confidences and wedding bands, long nights up with the children, years of devotion, doing your best. Now, suddenly he’s thinking. He’s thinking of hills for some reason, not mountains but soft hills and thunderstorms and David Bowie on stage in Berlin with his hair fluttering and The Women of Renaissance Ferrara and a drum beat and twenties spewing from a cash machine and his mother by the sea and James’s undeniable smile and there’s James in front of him now and looking at him feels like something rushing through him, a wind blowing open a multitude of doors. That’s what it feels like. That all his doors have blown open.

  It’s just gone ten on a Tuesday in early July, the bright light of day. He waits for the green man before crossing the road. He’d normally weave across, hands in pockets looking straight ahead, but there’s something in this moment about being a risk-averse, law-abiding citizen – not looking like one, being one.

  Anyway it buys him time. He could easily throw up. The last time he felt like this was when he did his Grade 4 bassoon exam when he was thirteen, fourteen. Bassoon. Not his idea, a pushy music teacher who took it upon herself to better his life prospects – everyone wants to be a pianist or violinist or cellist, but not so many bassoonists. There’s more chance of getting into an orchestra that way, she said; imagine a boy from round here getting into an orchestra. But he failed his Grade 4 twice, passed it the third time, just, and gave up.

  It’s the same feeling of nausea now; not just nerves but the feeling of acting a role that isn’t his, of not being himself. But then, that makes it easier in a way. He can convince himself that it isn’t him doing it.

  It’s moderately busy in the shopping centre, but they hoped for that. Up on his right is the surveillance camera that monitors the entrance; he knows from years of looking at surveillance screens that there’s a blind spot just below the camera, so he aims there, the narrowest sliver of space. He sees it, the cash machine, straight away, over on the left, as if it’s the biggest, brightest thing in the whole place – as if it’s the only thing. Someone’s using it. He goes to stand in the queue, not looking around to see where the others are. He knows they’re there, Mul, Lenny and James’s friend, Paul – they’ll appear from the shifting pattern of people milling about; they’ll appear. He knows that.

  The woman using the machine takes ages. It spits her card out and she starts again with a different one, then she messes around with onscreen balances, indecision over how much to take out. He doesn’t mean to look, he just doesn’t know where else to put his attention. There’s no camera at this machine, it’s too old, which is one of the reasons they chose it. Behind him he can feel the other three get into line, he can sense them. The way they all appeared at once so that there’s now a queue of four people, off-putting enough to send anyone else to the machine ten metres further down.

  She’s done, finally, and she stuffs her card and cash in a handbag that’s overfull and unzipped, an invitation to the opportunistic, he thinks, and he wants to warn her to zip it up. He normally would. He’s like that, people say – always looking out for everyone. When she’s gone he steps forward and pretends to go to his wallet for his card. Behind him, Lenny will have made the call to James by now. Just pressed call, then ended it. And James will be starting to do whatever it is he does with his computer to make things happen. So it’s a question of waiting, pretending to be doing something with the buttons, feigning frustration.

  Must be almost a minute by now. He hears a voice, Mul’s, in the queue behind him. Hurry up, mate. He turns. Sorry, problem with my card, he says, and seeing Mul there, and the other two, just a glimpse of them, is a wash of relief. Of comradeship, he thinks, then wonders where the hell that word came from. Some woman who’s contemplating joining the back of the line huffs and walks off.

  Then the whirring starts and the flap opens, and out it comes. Twenties at first, at a dazzling rate. Anyway, it seems that to him. Dazzling, the way they come in a blur of lilac. The way the machine goes so out of its way to empty itself for him. He pincers his fingers at the hole to hold the notes as they come out, to form them into a little stack, then he scrolls the stack (deftly, he’s practised) in the palm of his hand and transfers the first lot to the inner pocket of his jacket – smooth, that’s the thing. No grabbing, no rushing. Calm and smooth like nothing’s happening. Three stacks, four, five; they fall down through the cut pocket into the jacket lining; bags of room in there. Bags. Then the tens come, which means the machine’s been bled dry of twenties.

  He’s transfixed. His fear’s gone, and with it any sense of where he is. Time both stops and speeds up; he’s there for seconds and for hours, months, years. He could stand forever and watch those notes deliver themselves up into his fingers. It feels like something beautiful, really beautiful and perfect, the fulfilment of a prayer. It’s not even about the money. It’s the feeling that everything is all right. That nothing could harm him.

  Then it stops, the money stops, and he pockets the final stash. Is the machine empty, or did James make it stop? Anyway, it’s done. Suddenly his legs are liquid beneath him and his ears go deaf, there’s only white noise, and the blissful feeling has turned into something blank, then rapidly into adrena
line. His heart kicks up. He lingers a moment, then walks away.

  Can I escape this? The sword hangs. There is nothing to put my mind at rest – every day presents a new threat: the night. Every night is a battle, most often lost, and any victory is one day long, until its challenger comes along: the next night. I’m frightened. I understand why people kill themselves, or break down. I understand the bleakness of a life. The desire is to be a child again, to trust, to be comforted into peace and wellness.

  I’m not going to reassure you, you have to learn to stand on your own feet, you have to learn to change your thoughts.

  Can’t. Won’t.

  Must.

  Pressing nocturnal questions:

  Why do so many programmes on TV have the word ‘secret’ in the title? The Secret Lives of Dogs. The Secret Lives of Five Year Olds. The Secret History of Ireland. The Secret Life of the Zoo. Secrets of Underground Britain. Not so very fucking secret are they, if every other programme is intent on airing them? I don’t know how it can be that nobody at the BBC or at ITV understands the meaning of the word ‘secret’. Is a dog keeping its inner life a secret from us? Does it go around chortling conspiratorially to itself, trying to evade understanding? Is Ireland doing that? Is the zoo?

  Dear BBC, They are not secrets, just things we don’t necessarily know much about. I’ll withhold my licence fee until you can clear up this distinction.

  Why do so many TV programmes have ‘Britain’ or ‘British’ in the title? How the Victorians Built Britain. Great British Bridges. Great British Bake Off. King Arthur’s Britain: the Truth Unearthed. Brit Cops. Romancing the Stone: the Golden Ages of British Sculpture. Hidden Histories: Britain’s Oldest Family Businesses. The Great British Sewing Bee. Secrets of Underground Britain. We get it. We live in Britain. Great Britain. Great British Britain. We get it.

  Why is Brexit called Brexit, when it isn’t Britain leaving the EU, it’s the UK? Why isn’t it called Ukexit? Never trust something that’s inaccurately labelled. Even the name of this con is a con. Even the name is a shitshow, an almighty, extravagant, eternal show of shit.

  Why have I started writing this story about the man who robs a cash machine and loses his wedding ring? This man who sprang to mind as an example sentence about recursion. Where did he come from – in what fissure of my cranium has he been concealed? Can you rob a cash machine and get away with it? Does he get away with it? Would he really do it, this harmless, decent man who’s inherited my dad’s love of David Bowie, this man who looks like one of my dad’s old friends? Isn’t it pushing credibility? He doesn’t even have a name.

  Is the story going anywhere?

  Why are caravans called things like Pegasus, Sprite, Unicorn? Never a less sprightly thing did I ever see than the great off-cube of a caravan wobbling unaerodynamically along the slow lane on its tiny narrow wheels. It’s like calling a shopping trolley Icarus, Voyager, Swallow.

  My stepdad’s last day out in the world was spent walking by the sea and in a marine forest in Ireland. It wasn’t his last day on earth, but it was the last time he saw anything of the world beyond a hospital room. Where he and my mum walked, there are white sand beaches with black, orange and grey granite outcroppings; the ocean washes in and out of deep peninsulas and estuaries, and the beaches give way to dunes which give way to a forest deep in ferns, mosses, ancient calcified roots of trees and the smell of pine.

  This is what my stepdad saw that day. His last lungfuls of outside air couldn’t have been fresher. It was late May in the north-west tip of Ireland, the land was luminous with near-perpetual daylight. He watched the roaring Atlantic. Then later that evening, back in my grandparents’ cottage, he said he thought he was coming down with a cold, maybe flu. My mum went out to get him Beechams Powders, which he believed could cure anything. Later that night an ambulance was called. Two weeks later, after the intensive care wards of two different hospitals, he died.

  My cousin’s last day was spent out on his bike, a seventy-mile ride on a Saturday morning. He did the ride alone, and nobody had any contact with him after that. At some time in the next twenty-four hours he died, and his body was found by the police on Monday morning when his employer called them, worried because he hadn’t turned up for work. He always turned up for work.

  I would wish for my last day to involve an act of freedom – a walk by the ocean, a long bike ride, something I love. I hope that the walk and the bike ride were suffused with joy, with pleasure, for my stepdad and my cousin. Neither knew it was their last time to do that thing. If they’d known, would they have enjoyed it more or less? Eventually, everything has to be done for the final time. There must be many things that, without our realising it, already fall into that category for all of us.

  Final acts acquire holiness. My stepdad’s walk that day has. When we go to Ireland we almost always take the same route. We look out on the sea because it’s the last sea he saw. We write his name in the sand. We reflect, each of us inwardly, that one day we will never see this place again either. It’s a dull shock.

  If finality makes something holy then every moment is holy, because every moment could be the last. That’s a thought we spend too cheaply. Live each day as if it’s your last, we think, and then we don’t.

  Everything is holy. It’s only when we die that the holiness is called up. But it was always holy, all along.

  4 a.m.:

  Then into the cocoon of that warm moment a thought appears and begins to open: don’t think, it says. Don’t think.

  A voice in my head, which might be my own voice, my inner voice (but might not), dishes up the Larkin.

  The million-petalled flower of being here.

  The million-petalled flower of being here.

  As if it could act as an incantation to sleep, or as my side of a deal that mustn’t be broken – the Larkin poem had opened me and given me peace, and if I give the world my willingness, patience and peace, it should give me sleep. Shouldn’t it?

  Insomnia has turned me into a haggler. I’m always looking for the next thing I can trade with it or the next thing I can get from it, or the next bit of leverage I can use to cut a deal. When none of that works, it turns me into a beggar. I find myself pleading with it in the hope it will grant me what I want, when why would it? How could it? How could insomnia grant sleep? Isn’t insomnia the very last thing in the world to plead to for sleep?

  Whatever peace had been there has now diminished. Lie still, don’t move. Often this feeling: if I’m quiet and motionless sleep might sneak in. Where did this thought originate? When did it begin to seem that sleep wasn’t my right and could only be acquired on the sly, like contraband?

  Then the thought: stop thinking. You are always thinking.

  Then the thought: that was a thought, the thought to stop thinking.

  Then the thought: that was a thought, the thought that it was a thought to stop thinking.

  Then the reprimand: stop thinking.

  Then the thought: was that a thought, or an order from my higher mind?

  The thought: you think you have a higher mind?

  Thought: I’m awake.

  I turn over in a bid to start again. I’m angry with myself. Where did Larkin go? Where is my million-petalled flower of being here? The just-after-four flight from Bristol airport passes over in a distant smear of sound. I feel, suddenly, wide awake. Head abuzz on a slumbering body.

  I switch on the light, get my laptop and Google I AM AWAKE. I don’t know what I expect Google to do about this. The majority of results it returns are anyway about Buddhism whose blissful understanding of awakeness could not have been conceived by an insomniac. So instead I turn my raving, ranging mind to that vengeful little almond burrowed deep in my brain, the culprit of culprits, the amygdala, of which my hypnotherapist today did a crude drawing which set it at the centre of a page of multifaceted woe.

  An article explains how fear and anxiety, often conflated, belong to different parts of the amygdala – fear arises in i
ts central nucleus, which is responsible for sending messages to the body to prepare a short-term response – run, freeze, fight – whereas anxiety arises in the area responsible for emotions, a part which affects longer-term behavioural change. Fear is a response to a threat, anxiety a response to a perceived threat – the difference between preparing to escape a saber-tooth tiger that is here and now in front of you (because it’s always saber-tooth tigers in the examples) and preparing to escape the idea of a saber-tooth tiger in case one appears around the next bend. While fear will quickly resolve – you will run away, fight it or be eaten – anxiety has no such resolution. You will need to stand guard in case, in case. Forever in case. Standing guard will make the perceived threat seem more real, which necessitates a more vigilant standing guard. Fear ends when the threat is gone, while anxiety, operating in a hall of mirrors, self-perpetuates. As a friend once said to me: there is no grace for the imagination. You cannot be saved from an assailant that doesn’t exist.

  For me, now, a puzzle emerges. What, then, fuels insomnia – fear or anxiety? Anxiety, everyone says. Anxiety, my hypnotherapist says; you are safe in your bed yet your heart is racing as if a tiger is present. You must learn to see that there is no tiger.

  But there is a tiger: sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation isn’t a perceived threat but a real one, like thirst or starvation. It is the fear of not sleeping that raises the heart rate and tenses the muscles; fear, not anxiety. Here is where insomnia becomes intractable, because it deploys fear to act like anxiety. Where fear is a response to an external threat, insomnia is almost unique in giving rise to a fear that then causes the external threat. Being afraid of the saber-tooth tiger is what makes the tiger keep coming back – not seem to come back, but in fact come back. It is no use to say ‘don’t be afraid’. There is a tiger in your bedroom, you ought to be afraid. But it’s not a tiger you can ever overcome by freezing, fighting or running from, so all your mechanisms for dealing with a real threat fail, giving rise to more fear, which keeps the tiger coming back. A vicious circle of Euclidean perfection.