Category Archives: Writing

It’s your own and some other’s, you and not you, babbling on day and night in a lunatic monologue. A man muttering in a room, a man and his skull, a man in his skull, a man carrying around his skull, babbling on. Repeat, cease, start, forget, remember, circle, abandon, stop, continue. Prodded into speech, prodded and prodder. Sometimes it seems it could go on without you, a babble with a voice of its own, warring with its own words.

There was no such thing as consistency, life would always end up holding your ideas up to ridicule. That’s what life did, ridiculed your ideas and forced you to look at yourself until nothing remained. Eventually he had nothing left to hunt, nothing to grasp for or look down on. It was beautiful, it couldn’t get any worse! A voice told him to own up and start again in an empty place, then start over again.

When we first moved there, she loved it: the silence and solitude. She liked it when I didn’t speak much, so I spoke less and less. I felt marvellous in that peacefulness, though I sometimes missed my family. She did her work and sold some of it, enough for us to get by. She still didn’t sleep well, but she never complained; she just got up sometimes and went to the kitchen to fix a drink.
I laughed when she wanted to draw me. It was embarrassing, I felt like a model. She said if she drew me once a week she might be allowed to have me.
Thinking back it was a strange thing to say but I suppose drawing was her way of feeling connected to things, or to herself. I don’t know.
Once when she returned from an excursion and I went to kiss her she avoided me, then turned back, looked me deeply in the eyes, and said nothing for the rest of the evening. The next day she showed me the sketches she’d been doing: fearful things, like the gargoyles on cathedrals.
She started only sleeping during the day. She said the dark made everything seem too still and sinister to sleep, that the things in our house were conspiring against her.
One evening she said: ‘Say something. Please.’
I thought and said: ‘Isn’t it strange how two people who’ve lived together for years come to resemble each other? In their thoughts and faces. I want us to grow old like two trees that grow together, you’ve seen the ones in the forest, with all their cracks and wrinkles, even like the old couple at the store, you’ve seen the way they move, or that old man and his dog.’
She said, almost to herself: ‘It’s like God making Adam in one piece. Whole thoughts. Whole feelings. Then Eve with her sinister curiosity.’
She said nothing the rest of the evening.
She started selling fewer paintings and our savings dried up. I had to cook every meal and food isn’t easy to come by in those parts.
One day while she was painting I found her diary.
She’d written:

The fact is that life itself, everyday life with its people, chatter, money, dramas, ingesting and excreting, is nothing to me, has always been nothing: a paltry illusion. I don’t want it to be so but it is so. Landscape and portrait painters are ridiculous to me. Everything is ridiculous but what points away from, out of this life.

Talking to other people, socialising, falls so short of what it ought to be, of reflecting our real selves, that it disgusts me.

There was nothing about me, my name wasn’t mentioned once.
She asked me to stay up with her. She said she was afraid of her mind. She wanted me to ride out the silence with her.
After a week it started frightening me too. Some nights it seemed it would never end. She comforted me and told me she knew exactly how I felt.
It was the first time she’d caressed me for months.
She looked almost happy.
It was that touch that made her absence palpable to me. That was the moment I knew I had to leave.

(Based on Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf.)

The words stopped coming. He enjoyed the respite at first, later less. Much less. He cleared away ripped pages, unwritten books. Sometimes they appeared when he was drunk. Then through a haze of phrases he came stalking meaning, like some Kasper Hauser trying to make sense out of a childhood murk. Was it him or the words? He listened to them and they spoke him; there was no getting behind them. But it was exquisite when they dropped into the right places. But fleeting. There were turns and fading paths, but there were vantage points too. Or rather walks that got you lost then brought you back as someone new. The words woke him at night, phrases in his head like worms in a box.

In the doorway where I stood, where I was and was not. Can’t seem to get out of the way. So it’s like that today. Now I see only my reflection in the window — there for anyone to see through. Berating myself, I panic to whatever obscurity —

I pointed you to a pier where you could dive as I went up to the bar. In the evening we went through the old ritual of drawing hearts in the sand at low tide. Later still we made love accompanied by the song and sting of mosquitoes, your body burnished red-brown by the sun I avoided.

What if Judas hadn’t hanged himself but the real punishment had been to stay and haunt the Garden like a second Adam, to watch his past gain power by the hour? I can almost see him, shuffling between the trees, a barely tolerated tramp mumbling to the lost Messiah.

Some time after you were diagnosed, I took a photo of you. Your gaunt face was like an omen, or a beacon: I couldn’t decide. When they took you in for good – the end game you called it – I kept it with me. The more I looked at it, the less it gave me. One day a gust of wind blew it out of my hands; as I bent down to pick it up it blew away. I sat for hours looking at you propped up in that stiff alien gown, a glass of stale water on your bedside table. You’d look at me with a remote smile. Your skin was yellow and gave off a chemical odour. I thought, It’s spinning its cocoon around you, you’re shrivelling; or maybe falling through the veil at last, breathing yourself out and away. When the end game had been played out, I stole the glass and brought it home. I watched it grow grimy and studied the fading marks of your fingers and lips. Until it became just another object, it was saturated with your presence, the last link.