Now I Know (26 page)

Anyway, the doctor agreed. No one to know. And just her and Simmo with me.

Before the doctor arrived Simmo prepared me. An extra careful clean-up of my room. Fresh sheets on the bed. A new nightie she'd brought me specially. And the blind on my windows pulled down because my eyes might be damaged by strong light after being covered up for so long.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. Who said that? It's a line of poetry I read somewhere. Remembered it when Simmo pulled the blinds. My eyes couldn't bear the reality of unshaded sunlight.

What Simmo does, it seems to me, Nik, is exactly what you've been asking about. What she does is what belief
is
. Simmo being faithful day after day to people like me is belief. Nobody proved anything to her that persuaded her to do it. No one promised her much of anything, as a matter of fact. She just decided for herself that she would spend her life this way. I suppose what Brother Kit told you is right after all. Belief is an act of will, as much as it is anything. It's given you, true. But you have to decide to accept it.

[
Pause.
]

There I go again! Another sermon. But you did ask, even if it does seem centuries ago. And you keep on telling me no one knows the answer, and I keep on trying to tell you that they do. It's just that you're blind to it! You don't want to see it yet. You're like someone closing his eyes when he thinks he is going to be hit in the face. You're doing it so as to protect yourself. You know that if you accept the answer you'll have to do something about it. Because belief is about deciding what you mean to yourself. And once you know that, you have to do something about it, and you don't want the trouble this might cause. Not that I blame you. I'm only pointing out what's so.

[
Pause.
]

If you haven't switched off, I'll tell you the rest of the story of my seeing again. And no more sermons today, promise!

[
Pause.
]

Simmo got everything ready, then propped me up in bed in all my laundered glory, and I waited and waited for the doctor, but she didn't come and didn't come. Some emergency. She was two hours late! I was exhausted from keeping myself poised for the big moment. Even Simmo was sounding frayed.

Naturally, as soon as she arrived I felt guilty about grumbling to myself when she'd been attending a patient who really needed her, and so I came on too cheery and offhand, overcompensating like mad. The funny thing is, I've seen this kind of thing happen time and again in the surgery at work, and yet when it happened to me I behaved just like everybody else. But doctors get used to people acting like clowns, and she chatted to me for a few minutes to settle me down before she started the unveiling.

Which didn't take long. I deliberately kept my eyes shut till the bandages were off and the pads were removed and Simmo had cleaned the skin and rubbed in some sort of salve. Then the doctor said that was it, everything was ready and I could look.

I opened my eyes and blinked a few times, like you do after a long sleep, to get them working again, and there in front of me was the room I've been in all these weeks. Smaller than I'd expected, and even the gloom with the blinds down seeming too bright. And there was the doctor standing on one side of my bed and Simmo on the other. And my hands like stumps because of being wrapped up, lying on the bedclothes.

At first all I could do was stare at everything. I don't remember what I felt. Except astonishment and relief. But then I started laughing, giggling really, and the doctor and Simmo started laughing too, and Simmo gave me a hug and a kiss, and the doctor kept saying, ‘Well done, well done!' as if I'd just won an Olympic medal, and before any of us knew it we were all streaming with tears, even me, which was somehow marvellous too, because I thought if my eyes could cry they must really be okay. So for a while it was blubbing day in Side Ward Two, and before long Chrissy and Jean, the nurses on duty in the main ward, and all the walking wounded who've been visiting and reading and chatting to me lately, came in to join in the celebration, till Simmo had to put a stop to it in case I got over-excited and tired my eyes their first time out, so to speak. She sent everybody packing, and insisted I wear a blindfold for an hour to rest my eyes before giving them some more exercise.

[
Laughter
.]

Simmo is almost exactly like I imagined her, by the way, only prettier. You've seen her so you know. But the doctor is quite different. From her voice and her manner, I'd thought she must be tall and heavily built, one of those strong older women who are a bit tough from fighting their way up in a male-dominated profession. But in fact she looks like a kindly granny, thin as a fork, not very tall, with bobbed grey hair and a nice face with such amazing skin she doesn't need to wear make-up, and with gold-rimmed half-glasses stuck permanently on her nose. Just to look at her you'd think she wouldn't dare say boo to any kind of goose, never mind the geese she must have to put up with among her colleagues not to mention patients. Some people must get an awful shock if they take advantage of her, thinking she looks a push-over. Which just goes to show how deceptive appearances can be and how you can't always trust your eyes. So after all, seeing isn't enough for believing! [
She chuckles.]
I knew you'd want to know that, Nik!

[
Pause
.]

They wouldn't let me read or watch television, nor put up my window blinds. By night-time I'd got quite used to seeing again. Even the excitement was wearing off. But then this morning . . .

Phew!

It still takes my breath away.

[
Pause.
]

When I'd woken and settled myself for the day, Simmo came in and raised the blind. And that was the moment when I
saw
—really saw again. Simmo raising the blind was like opening my eyes for the first time, and there, through the window, was the scene I've been gazing at all day, and still am as I talk to you now.

Probably, if you were here to see it, you'd wonder what all the fuss is about. Because it's quite ordinary. Nothing to write home about in the normal way of things. Just a field of grass rather roughly cut to keep it trim. And a pond in the middle, not much bigger than a large pool. And a tree, a huge chestnut, to one side of the pool. And beyond a high old mellow brick wall hiding the main road. And above all that the sky. Nothing else. At least, nothing I can see from my bed. And framed by my window, it's like a picture. And I've watched it hour by hour all day, as the light has changed from early morning brightness to the evening glow I'm looking at now. And it's been like taking a long long drink when you're so dry you can't get enough to slake your thirst.

I looked and looked and thought: That was there all the time and I didn't know. I couldn't see it, and no one told me, so I couldn't even believe it was there and hope to see it one day. But it was there, all the time—like a ghost just waiting to show itself.

Which reminded me of a kind of poem, or maybe it's a prayer, I copied into my meditation book ages ago. It's by a Tibetan Buddhist monk from years back, fourteenth century, I think. His name was something like Long-champs—no, Long-chenpa, that's it. I remember it word for word because I've always liked it a lot.

Since everything is but an apparition

Perfect in being what it is,

Having nothing to do with good or bad,

Acceptance or rejection,

One may as well burst out in laughter.

And I did—burst out in laughter, I mean—because those words suddenly seemed exactly right in a way I'd not understood before. Partly, I laughed because it is so odd how you can read some words time and again, liking them, and thinking you understand them, but then one day you read them again for the umpteenth time and they suddenly make sense in a way you've never understood before, a way that you know properly and deeply for the very first time is what they really wanted to say to you all along.

You see, as I lay here looking so hard and so long, I began to see everything was perfectly itself. The grass was perfectly grass, and the pond perfectly a pond, and the water in it perfectly water, and the tree so perfectly a tree. And the light! Oh, the light! It was so perfectly itself too, perfectly
light,
and yet also perfectly everything else. Because without the light I couldn't have seen anything. It illuminated everything. Made everything visible. Made everything
there
.

And I thought: Yes, the light made everything visible that is
there.
But it also
made
everything. Without the light nothing would exist. The grass, the pond, the water, the tree are all light, only light. Their perfection is made by the light.

For hours I had the amazing impression that time had stood still—that all the world around had ceased to move. I waited for the sensation to pass, for time to begin again, but the strange feeling persisted. Time seemed suspended. And I cannot forget one detail of the time I lay here watching it all.

As I watched, the sunlight played on the ripples of the water and flickered on the leaves of the tree as they moved in the breeze. And the light broke up into thousands of individual flecks. But I knew they all came from the same source. They were all, each fleck, perfect sunlight, and were also all the same thing, the Sun. They came from the sun and go back to the sun and are the sun now while they are flecks of light on the water.

The light reveals the water so we can see it, and the ripples of water reveal the flecks of sunlight so that we can see in them perfect individual particles of the sun. They don't blind us if we look at them, though we would be blinded if we looked at them all together in the perfect Sun.

And I knew that is how it is with us and how it is with God. We are perfectly what we are, as the flecks of sunlight are perfectly flecks of sun. And we are individual particles of God who we come from and are already all the time, now, here, every day. The flecks of light don't go looking for the sun. They are the sun. In themselves and all together. And we don't need to go looking for God. We are God, in ourselves and all together.

Perhaps that's why I've always loved St John's Gospel more than all the other books in the Bible—because it starts off by saying just that, and goes on to tell us how it is that we are God.

[
Pause.
]

‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God . . . In him was life; and the life was the light of men.'

[
Pause.
]

As I looked and looked, it was all there, written in front of me, in the grass and the pond and the tree. Like a message written in the earth and left for me to find. Just like it was all there for you, Nik, that evening in Sweden. Only you felt apart from it, shut out from it, and wanted to plunge into it so you could belong to it. Whereas for me, as I lie here in the fading light still looking and still knowing, I feel already part of it. One of it. One with it. Me . . . perfectly me . . . confined to bed and not happy like this, but perfectly unhappily me. And happy at the same time to be me because I know I am part of that which always Is—capital I—all the time for ever. And after today, the great gift of today, I can remember and tell myself about it and try and understand more deeply still. But in my own time and at my own pace. It's all there waiting, simply
being,
like the grass and the pond and the tree were there and waiting when I opened my eyes and the blinds were raised. It won't run away.

Perhaps this is one of the good things to come out of my bomb. And maybe what was being given me in the terrible second of the explosion was time. Time to think at my own speed, I mean, and to see what I saw today.

[
Long pause.
]

It's dark now and I'm tired. I've done nothing today, nothing at all, except look at a pool of water and a tree and the light playing on them. And, dear Nik, dear God, I've been for the first time in weeks perfectly myself and perfectly happy.

†

NIK
'
S NOTEBOOK
:   The nightmares have been terrifying. Every night I was away. Julie running. The explosion. Julie in flames, screaming. The fire, like fingers reaching out for me. Then I black out.

Twice I woke up, shouting, with Dominic, whose cell was next door, holding me so that I wouldn't throw myself out of bed, which I did the first night.

Since coming home I haven't been able to sleep much. Maybe I'm afraid of the dreams? But also, a couple of press people are still sniffing around, wanting to talk to me. And that makes me furious. Grandad curses at them now, which only makes things worse. So I have to watch it when I go out. If Grandad is here, he performs diversionary tactics at the front while I skip off at the back. But I'm fed up of this.

The leptonic OBD turned up yesterday, all gush and smarm. The group send their best, etc.,
ad nauseam.
Don't know whether he meant it, but he never sounds sincere, just creepy. And he's still sticking it to the holey mints with his reptilian tongue. Asked about the explosion. Everybody asks about that, everybody, and what they really want to hear are the gory details, the blood and guts and mayhem. He even suggested it would be ‘a smashing idea' if we included a reconstruction of the bombing in the film.

That'd grab em, says he, rubbing his little hands together like an excited lizard. Really contemporary, that would be, really relevant. Maybe Christ could be the bomber? That's it, he says, getting quite beside himself with excitement, Christ the urban revolutionary. And the bomb he's placing has been tampered with by the CIA so that it blows him up when he's setting it. Instead of being crucified, he'd be blown to kingdom come by the fascist functionaries of the state. He lies in the road, squirming and black and bleeding, and muttering my God, my God, why have you not stood by me, and around him, peering down at him are a soldier, a policeman, a man in a dark suit with a briefcase—representatives of the earthly powers that be—while he dies in agony as a church clock strikes three. I can see it all. Terrif, eh? So the political establishment wins again, just like it did the first time. And with you playing Christ, Nik, there'll be the extra human interest of knowing you went through that, well nearly that, you're still with us, thank goodness. But what a great scene, eh?