The Playhouse

When I left home it was dark. I hadn’t slept and was muzzy and dizzy with fatigue and misery and the beginnings of a hangover. I had made the decision about what to do, but driving though the lanes had given me more time to think so when I get to the cattle grid at the bottom of the mountain road I stop and open the sun roof. No sun, but I lay back in the seat and look up at the sky which is inky-silky-slickly black and pulsing with stars and planets and constellations. Infinity. As a child I went through a phase of complete terror about there being no end, no full stop to the world I lived in. I couldn’t bear the idea of there being endlessness, some nebulous vastness. A place you might cross in to and just be a speck of nothingness in nowhere.

Now I am thinking about crossing over, crossing the finish line, about crossed lines. About the misunderstandings that crossed lines can cause, misinterpretation, misapprehension; this has been all of those and more. I have crossed so many lines in so many ways in the last few weeks. Little, flibbertigibbet, slipping off the tongue fibs and monstrous, monstrous lies. The lying is out of my control now, I have veered off on to dangerous moral terrain with sheerer drops than the mountains ahead of me.

Somewhere out there in the dark cloak of the mountains, there will be groups of soldiers on manoeuvres, blackened faces, camouflaged, practicing to protect, deflect, react, to cross lines in to danger zones. I get briefly snagged by wondering about being ordered over the line. No questioning, just obeying. How much easier it would be if someone would just order me to cross over, to go over the top. Someone else could take the decision and the prevarication could all end.

‘Come on, get on with it. What are you waiting for? Over you go.’

The endless, noisy babbling in my head could stop and the way forward would be clear. My brain feels like an overflowing bath. More thoughts streaming in from taps that are turned on to full and there being no choice but to let them in and then watch them splish-splash over the side. I want to pull the plug and let them all go. My brain is drowning.

On the passenger seat beside me my phone is displaying an email that starts, ’This will be my last communication.’ A clever little construct with its double meaning. It may be my last ever communication or just my last one to you. I wear myself out with my cleverness. I hear my mother saying,

‘You’ll cut yourself you’re so sharp!’

Whether the message is sent or not depends on the decision to cross over on to the road. I have sent a lot of messages that on the surface are intelligent and considered but which are thick with bleedy-neediness. You send back beautifully crafted anodyne, astringent responses, professional, measured, though for a brief moment I upturned that. At least I think I did.

You are sick to death of me. An apt idiom for you who deals with sickness and death every day. That thought segues in to ‘what can’t be cured must be endured’. I know now that you can’t cure my sickness and I know I can’t endure it. What is worse, is that, now, you are, cross stitched in to it and I can’t tell where you and it start and finish and can see no way to unpick you from you from the complex quilted pattern that tells the story of the entanglement of our lives.

So where does that leave us? Will you be the death of me? That was one of my mother’s favourites:

‘You will be the death of me’.

My mother has been dead for a year now but she has become suddenly present. The presence takes the form of a chirruping Jiminy Cricket – though she should read the job description since she has done nothing significant to prick my conscience over the last few weeks, but then she never was there when I really needed her – crossed with Long John Silver’s parrot which endlessly repeats her favourite idioms, adages and proverbs. When these fail her, she resorts to her favourite phrase of,

‘Why can’t you just be normal? Why do you have to be different?’

I hear the vexedness in her voice and I know that I vexed her all her life. I was a vexatious child and adolescent and adult in her eyes. In some ways this distresses me. In others I want to know why she couldn’t have paid more attention when I needed her to.

There is a Neil Young song circulating in my head

‘I’ve seen the needle and the damage done […] I love you baby can I have some more’.

Over and over and over again. I can’t get rid of the thought that a needle has been slipped lightly under my skin while my head was turned away looking in some other direction and that is why I am now a hopeless addict.

There is another song. How does that song go? ‘I’ve got you under my skin.’ Something about sacrificing everything to have you near? Having you near has caused nothing but damage. You crawled under my skin and quite simply infected every inch of me. I want to peel my skin away and let you out.

I pick up the phone and swipe across to look at the photos I have of you. I am trying to work out if this is worse than the posters of pop stars I had on my bedroom wall as a teenager. I didn’t know them either, I worshipped them from afar and swooned and screamed at concerts and scoured weekly teen mags for pictures of the object of my fantasy at any given time. I suspect that my photos of you are far less innocent but they are all about fantasy and have nothing to do with reality. You join a long line of people that I entertained romantic fantasies about; silly, schoolgirl crushes and obsessions long in to adulthood. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that I have no idea who you are and know even less about you than the idols of my teenage years whose lives were picked over and reported on in intimate detail; every tiny bit of information devoured and savoured.

I had recently discovered a word, limerence. It sounds rather lovely, like a drink, like limoncello. It also sounds like it should have its roots in Latin, like limerentia, (lovesick) or limen, a threshold, but, limerence is a made up word, apparently, to describe ‘an involuntary interpersonal state that involves an acute longing for emotional reciprocation, obsessive-compulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and emotional dependence on another person’, think Romeo and Juliet. I’m sure this used to be called having a crush, or unrequited love, infatuation, love sickness, but it seems that limerence is more about obsession, addiction and it is the unobtainable nature of the LO (Limerence Object) which makes the feeling so powerful, intermittent reinforcement from the LO being used as a hook. Limerence can result in quite normal people behaving very irrationally, some aspects of everyday life being sacrificed by the all-consuming need for the LO, the waiting for a response to fuel the hope excluding everything else. And when I found it, the word, I knew that it exactly described me, what I was feeling. Consumed, irrational, obsessed.

The intensity of longing to reverse time, to wind all that has happened in the last few weeks back is insufferable. I need it to stop. When I can get my brain to come back to me from the undergrowth of the deep dark places it seems determined to explore, I can see that you are nothing more than a piece of madness, but the scents of the deep dark places are stronger than I am and my brain gets less and less easy to call back. It was on the trail of something far more interesting than sanity and was returning to its old hunting grounds.

There are three photos. In the days before our last meeting, I played my own version of the shell game with them, trying to work out who it is that has caused so much mayhem. I have been rotating them endlessly hoping that underneath one of them lies a nugget of truth. Eeny, meeny, miny mo. They aren’t all the same of course, they are all quite different. Unlike the real shell game this is not a case of three identical containers which hide one thing.  In this version of the game I see three different people but I am looking to see if there is just one person contained within them. I am looking for a single identity. If I concentrate hard enough, if I am quick enough, I will swipe to one of the pictures and there you will be, revealed, the real you. I know there is sleight of hand involved here somewhere. I know I have been deceived, I just can’t see how the trick was done.

The photo of you from the website is a rather peculiar three-quarter profile. In it your nose looks enormous and your left ear is disproportionately large. How can anyone have an ear that large? Honestly, you really should look at the portrait someone has done of Van Gogh with an enlarged ear. It is the reverse of your photo with an enormous right ear, but the similarity is frightening. I do wonder later if you have had had cosmetic surgery on your nose and your ears; they don’t look like that when we meet and I desperately want to ask. That nose; Cyrano nose; patrician nose; naughty, lying little Pinocchio nose? You aren’t looking at the camera but you are smiling and there is a sense of trustworthiness about you. The nose continues to bother me long after we first meet though.

Another picture is of you receiving an award of some sort. You are wearing a dreadful suit and horrible tie. You look self-deprecating, floppy haired and ‘nice’. God knows the arguments I had over the years with teachers, lecturers, professors about that word.

‘It means nothing’. ‘It is a nothing word.’

But, you look pleasant, agreeable, satisfying; the definition of nice. What more could we ask for than someone who is pleasant and agreeable and will be satisfying. Later I look at these two pictures and wonder how this floppy-haired, slightly awkward looking individual with the big nose can have caused such terrible damage and I wonder endlessly even now, who he is.

The third picture, oh this picture is the one that sets the scene for all the disaster that followed. I didn’t see this until the addiction had fully taken hold. I promised myself that whatever happened I wouldn’t start internet stalking. It would be weird and obsessive and I wasn’t the kind of person who did this. I didn’t want to be the person who does endless searches looking for the tiniest bit of information sat in the middle of the night hunched over the keyboard typing in different permutations of your name and what little I know about you.

The web, though, dream weaves its own stories and creates its own kind of cyber magic. It throws its net and lures you in with its siren song and, really, if you are careful, no-one can see you. You can roam around anonymous under a cloak of invisibility every bit as good as the ones in fairy tales. You can be whatever you want to be.’ You can create stories for yourself and about yourself and no-one can see. You can create stories about other people. You can be the hero, the heroine – or both at the same time, the web doesn’t really do gender – the good guy, the bad guy. What you really are never has to be revealed, or can be completely revealed. What you want to be can be created by a couple of clicks. If it is real or a construct is impossible to tell and perfect for the consummate story teller.

The third picture is so entirely at odds with the other two that I can only believe that this is you for a different audience. Medicine has taken to the internet. Just what the doctor ordered. Out from the consulting rooms and in to the realms of social media and apps. 24/7 access, online cures, TV doctors looking at embarrassing bodies. There is something in this image that speaks of ‘metrosexual cool’, ‘on trend’. You are selling yourself to some other audience. This is not the you who wants frightened and anxious sick people to trust you. This is the ‘I am out here on the edge writing ground breaking research papers and communicating with other very cool people around the world’ version of you.’ It is so completely at odds with the other photos that I can’t believe it is you. Even after we have finally met, I struggle to recognise this person. You are broadcasting on more than one channel.

This problem image is from a photo taken, probably, by someone you know well. There are clearly two other people in it standing/sitting next to you. They have been cropped out nearly but not quite. From the point I find it, I understand there is some other you or perhaps multiple other yous and that I have no idea about you and your life. This is someone who is facing the camera, blue eyes slightly shut, sunglasses pushed back on your head, lips very slightly parted. Suntanned. You are wearing a blue jacket.  It is a curiously provocative image. A more sensual, relaxed version of you. You have chosen this image of you for a number of research sites and social media. There is no sign whatsoever of the huge nose and ears and I go back to the plastic surgery theory. This is another self and not the same one I see in the other photos and not the one I meet in the consulting room. He is different again but I don’t understand this until much later.

I agonise over the authentic you. Eventually, I realise it is hardly fair to ask about the real you when I have done nothing but present you with a series of my characters. The truth, I now realise, is that you can be all those people. You are a whole person. It is me who is the collection of scattered snapshots of the people I have tried and failed to be over the years. I had always hoped that perhaps I was like the Russian dolls that so fascinated me when I was younger and that when you finally got to the smallest doll that this would be the real me, but I understand now that actually in the middle of me is a vast empty space, the infinity that so scared me as a child.

Snap, crackle, pop. The soldiers are firing at each other in the dark. In the thick silence up here by the mountains, the noise is loud and out of sync with the heaviness of the quiet. In my head synapses are misfiring and creating odd jerky memories. The popping reminds of when I was a child. We made necklaces with multicoloured pop beads. These quite literally popped together and I could spend hours popping beads together and then pulling them apart which was oddly more satisfying than making them. I don’t know what made me think of them but I know that hourly I am becoming more and more un-popped, there is barely anything left that resembles a continuous string of rationality. Each pop sends another tiny particle of sanity spinning off in to the cosmos. Of course, it is the popping sound and the sight of the stars threading through the sky that remind me of the beads. Looking up is making me feel too speck-like. I lay my head on the steering wheel.

The sun starts to rise, slipping up from behind the mountains and turning everything sherbet pink and orange. The road up the mountain has been newly tarmacked and threads its way to the top as dark and twisty as a string of liquorice. Black Mountain, black road. Breath-taking and life taking. The shadows of the clouds dance across the surfaces of the pale grass and dark gullies. There are vapour trails criss-crossing the sky. I am picking at a memory about them having a name now – contrails? It is beautiful and elemental and glorious. I remember now why we moved here. Buzzards and kites are circling, swooping, their silhouettes adding to the patterns on the hillsides. Scavenging. I am caught by a fierce yearning to pull my head off and toss out it for the birds. Let them feed on my imagination; there is plenty to pick through; rich pickings. Perhaps when it is clean and only the white carcass remains, I can pick up it and start again with an empty space.

‘I just don’t understand what goes on in your head!’ My mother shrieking at me.

‘I can’t imagine how hard it must be to live in your head. It must be very difficult’

This was said to me in moment of sheer frustration by someone who, now I think of it, really did see I needed help. He was a lovely, kind, uncomplicated man and I can still see his bewilderment at some of the things I did. Actually, he had no idea what a mess my head is. It is full of the past and wobbling stacks of memories/if only/why?

I avoid thinking about the past too much. Big chunks of it don’t bear too much close scrutiny. It is bowel curdling in some places and alcohol blank in others. It really is another country and best left off the tourist trail of monumental regrets, though I do make the odd sortie to the part of my brain where the worse bits are stored. A land mined landscape, thousands of unexploded humiliations and misgivings and bitterness just waiting to detonate if you don’t watch your footing. One wrong step and ‘Boom!’ There they all are, those regrets drifting and twisting in the air. It is a cruel place where bad thoughts roam waiting for the perfect opportunity to stage an ambush. They hide themselves in dugouts in the wasteland spaces, firing rapid rallies of ‘Did I really do that?’, ‘What I was thinking’, ‘How could I ever even have gone there!’ These are the bad decisions; the ones made during the’ booze is better than reality’ phases. These are the ones that, once they manage to creep stealthily in to the open spaces, are, quite literally, more than flesh and blood can stand. Once they are exposed, they are blown around by blustery winds of guilt and sorrow at the losses, the snipers get line of sight and take their killer shots. The memories weep and bleed out after every hit and travel through my veins to my toes which curl with a cocktail of shame and embarrassment and hurt. My whole body blushes and the heat of it burns through every inch of me.

‘I should jolly well think so. You should be ashamed of the way you carry on.’ Another of mother’s favourites.

For years I have kept all the hurt in tightly locked boxes, stored away out of sight. I can keep the intruding thoughts at bay. I can stay away from all the destruction that went before. It doesn’t do to keep looking at it. Still, if I had taken the opportunity for a short sightseeing trip back to remind myself of the dangers, what happened next wouldn’t have and you wouldn’t be roaming round taking my thoughts hostage and holding them to ransom, kidnapping what little reason I have left and turning it back to its old ways.

A motorbike passes the car at such speed that I feel the vibration. Using the road up the mountain for thrill seeking happens daily. Flirting with death, feeling that edge, tight-roping between life and loss of it. Moments of sheer aliveness, adrenalin injected through the system. It reminds me that I need to decide what to do now. I turn the radio on and Whitney Houston comes pumping through with her lonely heart and wanting to dance with somebody. I think about dancing with death.

I have thought about that a lot recently and wondered if it is the answer. That is what has brought me here. I have lost control now and I can’t claw it back. I don’t understand what has happened and I don’t know how to fix it. I have to assume that this is punishment though I really don’t know what for. My mother would.

‘You deserve everything you get’.

I am not sure I deserve anything that has happened to me but she is probably right. I should probably have tried harder, taken more responsibility, spent more time trying to change things and be the person she hoped I would be. I should have tried much harder. She always thought she was right where I was concerned. And, I suppose, that I do think I should be punished because I let something bad happen and I didn’t stop it. One of her absolute favourites was,

‘I don’t know what I did to deserve you.’ I understand how she feels now because I have no idea what I did to deserve you, absolutely no idea whatsoever.

I am bone weary. Everything that has happened in the last few weeks is playing on a constant loop, I can’t stop it and I can’t fast forward so I go back to the beginning.