This would be a shitty insipid hotel room, beige and pointless, but for its one concession to non-generic decor, a drawing of a strange kind of dragon. Or it could be a snake. It stares right out at me, snout almost projecting from its two-dimensional plane, right over the sink where you’d expect a mirror to be. I don’t miss having a mirror, the glass over the picture is good enough. When I wash my face, I can see my own two eyes reflected side by side in that snakey mug.
But this is all distraction, isn’t it? I must, for once, stop distracting myself. I must focus. I am tired. To be fair, it’s been twenty years of constant effort, pulling away in any direction, and that is exhausting. But when I let my mind snap back on its own elastic, it only ever returns me to Cambridge. Those months at the end of my first Easter term are real—they are as real now as they were then. As for everything in between then and now, that gets hazy. Hey, let me tell you a story with a weak female lead. It doesn’t have a narrative arc so much as a trough, or maybe a cliff would be more accurate.
Perhaps that’s an uninviting invitation. What do you want me to do about it? What we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either. That’s Frank Ramsey. Telling Wittgenstein off. So take it or leave it. The one thing I’m sure about is that first year in Cambridge. That really happened. I can’t get away from that, however far I run.
Twenty years and an ocean? It’s nowhere near enough. I can never go back to Cambridge because I can never leave.
Part One Corridors
When that I was and a little tiny boy
Chapter One
My mother stopped talking when I was born. They said it was “catatonia,” which to me sounded like a country. So I thought she caught a disease when she was travelling there, and now her tongue was infected. Or had to be amputated. Perhaps they had to cut out my mother’s tongue because there was something wrong with it.
I was born on her birthday. Just coincidence, there was never any connection between us. But even though she wouldn’t talk, I saw her all the time. My aunt and uncle said I had to go. I remember once asking why bother when she didn’t care, and everyone was very angry and I didn’t understand. By the time I could have asked more questions I suppose I had got used to it. I didn’t hate it, it was just a thing that happened, like breakfast or brushing your teeth. For most of the time I can remember, my mother lived in a tiny room in the corner of a red-brick building we called “the home.” But for the first six years of my life she was in hospital.
I grew up there, grew into the hospital. As soon as I could walk, I was left to wander alone out of her room and off down the endless white-blue corridors. This was better than keeping me in with her, because I was so bored and curious about all the machines in there that I’d start pressing buttons just to see what they’d do. Once I pulled a red cable out of something—perhaps it was my mother’s body—and set off an alarm, and a nurse came running tap tap tap down the corridor. My uncle had freckles and hairy arms, and when he was angry the hairs on his arms stood up in between the freckles and I would count them so I didn’t have to look at his face.
In those windowless tunnels, nobody who knew who I was cared where I was, and nobody who knew where I was cared who I was. That’s what being free means—we’ve forgotten this now. I hummed myself along, making up my own little tunes in time to my echoing steps. I’d turn corners and run into people, like kind nurses, or sad women, or serious adults in a big hurry. Quickly or slowly, they all passed me by because I wasn’t their problem. I knew better than to make myself their problem. I kept my eyes straight ahead and looked as grown-up as I could. I remember the moment when I realized it was a grown-up thing to do to smile back when someone smiled at me, and I stored that away as something I could use in future: a quick signal that I really was old enough to be there on my own. Just enough to stop the foreheads of the kind nurses from scrunching up, and their heads swinging back around in concern as we went our opposite ways.
Of the others roaming the corridors, the sad women were the most interesting. I’d pause my own adventures sometimes to watch them pace up and down. I’d follow them into the ladies’ toilets to see if they really needed to go or just wanted somewhere to walk to. They were with me but not with me, which was perfect. If they smiled at me, I smiled back. Sadly.
—
One time, a sad pink woman swung out into a corridor
