“It’s burning me,” I’d whine, and my aunt would tell me about when she was a girl and had to bathe in cold water even when there were ice patterns on the windows.
“On the inside!” She’d pretend to shudder at the memory, then giggle. “As for you, the problem is you’re not…” and she’d trail off, looking for the right word. “You’re not robust.”
The night after that latest appearance of What’s missing from this picture, I couldn’t sleep. I found myself running a bath at about one o’clock in the morning. I looked like a little alien in the bathroom’s flat square of mirror, my eyes far bigger than I remembered. I stared way back into the mirror, letting my gaze refocus as if I might somehow be standing behind myself. But all I could see over my shoulder were ghosts rising from the hot water.
The enamel was cold under my naked frame as I perched on the ledge. I clutched at the top of the tub with my right hand, nails scratching underneath the rim where it wasn’t lined. Why don’t I just put some cold water in there? I could not understand why I did the things I did. A whole foot went in, stinging badly where I’d made mistakes shaving around my ankles that morning. I had used a disposable razor that should probably have been disposed of a few weeks before. Now it sat beside me once more on the edge of the tub. Why am I bothering to get in? Why did I bother to get undressed? Both feet slid under the water. Because a bath is good. A bath is a good way to look after yourself. We didn’t have the term self-care until later, when it became a promising commercial strategy and everybody picked up on it. The water burned more and more of my skin. Once I was properly in the tub, I reached across for the razor and sliced a red line into my thigh.
On the side of the tub, just above the waterline, one end of a curly black pubic hair clung for dear life to the enamel while the other end waved freely in the steam like an eel in a river current. I lowered myself down into the water until my head was at its level, and looked it in the face. Its ominous, eyeless mouth-end snaked around, weaving a charm for my strange eyes. Then it fell into the water, swam towards the red line in my thigh and attached itself there. Homesick for my body? If it was even one of mine to start with—I hadn’t bothered to rinse the tub before I got in.
I watched the red line for a half-hour or so. It made the water pink at first, but apart from that it made no difference to anything. I might as well have been watching a video of myself. I closed my eyes. There was something I wasn’t seeing—I kept being distracted by misleading signs, pointed down blind alleys by false clues. In the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot is played by Albert Finney, with piggy little eyes and over-pomaded hair. He’s just found the body of a man in a train carriage with twelve stab wounds. There are two different matches and a smoked cigar in the dead man’s ashtray, together with a burned scrap of notepaper, and a stopped watch in his pyjama pocket. As Poirot’s picking up a handkerchief with the initial H (or is it a Russian letter N?) he has this singsong line: Has it occurred to you that there are too many clues in this room? All that overload, all those attempts to distract him, send him spinning in the wrong direction, and he could see through it all.
Let us proceed by examining what I hope will prove to be the last of them, the burnt paper. By the final scene, he will have put everything in order. That was what I needed to do. Once things were in order, they would make sense. Order and method. I rinsed out the bath, went back to my bed, and lay down on my towel. My bedroom window gave on to Trinity Street, towards the post office and All Saints Passage. Across the road an old dog was sniffing, alone, round where the craft markets were held during the day.
—
It’s inevitably halfway between states that things happen. On the knife edge between one resolution and another. When waking and sleeping become glazed and dulled, the liminal condition lives, breathes, haunts. Nyx is an ancient representation of the night, something more powerful than we can imagine. Hypnos and Thanatos are her twin sons: Hypnos is sleep and Thanatos is death. They are both very, very old, but Nyx is older.
I lay on my bed, looking out over the small square lawn in front of the College, beside the Great Gate. As it was told to tourists, the tree at the centre of that lawn was Newton’s apple tree. People don’t want history to be complicated. The simple legend sells. Maybe it was at least an apple tree. I couldn’t have cared less what it was. But I was stuck there in a dreamlike semi-awareness of it, imagining all the ways Deb might have died in pain and fear. These were the worst moments, but I couldn’t avoid them. When I closed my eyes, my thoughts all clumped together like clusters of cereal, and the dark air birthed these chimaeras. I lived through all of Deb’s possible horrors, each time recombined in a new way. Half-asleep soundscapes would enfold me and I’d hear Deb’s laughter, or the happy slow sound of her talking, then it would suddenly be silenced.
But this time I heard a different voice, breaking through the usual polyphony. It sounded like it came from the floor below. This
