Where the West Wind Blows (2 page)

But I am head to toe black.

I will never forget this.

I am darkness, right down to my aching bones.

James leaves instruction for a wicker coffin, no flowers; he asks to be lain in a shady dell in an aspen grove with bluebells planted above him. He leaves detailed instruction for the disposal of his defunct body and each one of his possessions is carefully itemised. His paintings are left to charity; his equipment to the university while I am left his share of the house and business. But he has forgotten to leave a directive as to what should be done with me. He should have left a note telling me what I am to do, how I should feel.

But he gets his last wishes. I give him that much although, by the time it comes to carrying out his arrangements, I am so brimful of anger that if he walked into the room now, I would want to kill him.

There is no one to tell
me
what to do, how to live, how to get warm, how to sleep, how to eat, how to carry on, how to be me. I wish someone would tie a label upon my ear bequeathing me to a new owner.

Day by day, I draw deeper into myself. I cast off the bright colours that were my signature and paint dark, demonic pictures, monochromed nightmares that become real at bed-time.  I paint until my back and neck are screaming with agony and I can stand up no longer, then I lie in our empty bed, wrap my arms around my trembling body and try to shut out the memories. I am so far removed from death, so lonely and I cannot stop the deep, racking sobs from tearing me further apart.

Loneliness is a sort of madness, it consumes, it burns, it screams in the night and it never lets you rest. Each breath becomes a torture, each moment an anguish because I am alone and I cannot reach him and I don’t know what to do.

It should be easy to take a step forward. One foot in front of another; that is all it takes. A baby can do it. It has never been difficult before but now I cannot motivate myself and I don’t really want to. The future is empty of James and all I want is to dive back into our past, bury myself in the dark, stinking ground beside him because it seems a much better option than living alone. I used to be strong, I used to be ambitious but now, it seems as if my backbone has crumbled clean away.

The silence screams, mocking my misery and my unspoken fury. Our home is a torment of memories. The bed we shared, the bath we splashed in, the rug we made love on, the table where … I close my eyes, take deep breaths that seem only to aggravate the ever-constant ache, as if life itself, as if the simple act of breathing, is the wrong thing to do.

Surrounded by mocking memory I fear to even raise my head, take my eye away from the canvas. My life, such as it is, might yet last for another forty years. I do not think I can bear that. The future holds too many inhalations; too many steps before I can finally beat out the hurt and extinguish all feeling and get rid of this pain. I want to stop hurting.

Somehow half a year passes but these feelings do not recede, they grow stronger and each night I retire earlier and earlier to our bed. It is empty, the mattress vast but somehow it is full of him … for now. Slowly, imperceptibly, the unchanged sheets are giving up his scent, his pyjama top that I clutch each night is absorbing the smell of me instead. I am losing him, even forgetting his personal aroma, the solidity and the joy of him. I try to clutch at his memory, wanting to squeeze it tightly but, like an old photograph, he is fading.

But he is vivid in my dreams.

James rears like a sculpture above me, his limbs glinting in the light of the moon, coated with sweat, his eyes smiling as he loves me, his presence like the scent of a garden on the wind. His memory rubbing and tickling, coming close, pulling away, his lips and fingers teasing, his presence, his essence possessing me.

I buck my hips in desperation and wake, my clitoris throbbing, breasts aching.

Alone in our vast, soft bed.

With shaking limbs I slide from the sheets and drink deeply from the glass of tepid water on my bedside table, close my eyes and wait for my body to cease its lustful pounding.

I can’t stand this
.
This cannot go on
.
I miss him so much.

I put on my slippers and go quietly downstairs to the kitchen with the wraith of my love wafting just behind.

Downstairs the moon floods the world with a bluish light that turns my kitchen into the Damien Hirst painting, the one with the skull and the ash tray and the knife. It illuminates the worktops, tints the white ceramic sink, the washing up on the drainer, the cold tap dripping slowly, like time …like life. The table is scattered with papers, dirty cups and saucers, an abandoned sketchbook, unread newspapers that I should have cancelled and, on the wall above the worktop, a row of glinting metallic blades tempt me, offering an answer.

I kneel on the floor in my nightdress. The blood flows in orgasmic warmth. There is no pain, just relief, just acceptance and a sort of bliss. It will be over soon. I sigh with satisfaction and the happy red mouths on my wrists smile back at me.

My eyes close …

Happy red mouths - smiling.

I wake in a grim, grey room. There are bars at the windows and drab floral curtains form individual bays, compartments for our sorrow that afford no privacy. The covers are drawn tightly across my chest, restraining me, trapping me, holding me so firm I can scarcely move. I turn my head and see a jug of water on the clean, scrubbed bedside table, a clear plastic beaker, a box of Kleenex. I inhale the stench of misery, and the stench of the living dead.

I don’t know where I am or how I got here. Fear creeps from my belly to take possession of my throat and I want to scream, I want to tear back the covers, I want to run away, from this bed, this nightmare, from myself.

I open my mouth …

The curtain about my bed is pulled sharply back and she is there; a vague memory flickers, colour flashing and fading. I’ve seen her before, I remember her now. A girl in a drab dressing gown with lank hair and bandaged arms … like mine.

I don’t know her name.

She makes herself comfortable on the end of my bed and begins picking restlessly at her dressings. “It’s itching like mad,” she says, “but they won’t let me have them off, even though I’ve told ‘em I’m allergic.”

My mouth is dry, the medication is making my breath stink, my tongue thick and grey. I drag myself from sleep, pull myself up, my wrists throbbing dully, and stare at her blankly, blink around the ward at the other patients, all in various stages of madness.

My shrink, or the therapist as I am supposed to call him, tells me they aren’t mad at all, just ‘displaced’ or ‘unhappy’ and I have the sense to agree with him, knowing he will never discharge me if I do not appear rational – whatever that is.

Not that I want to go home. I can’t face that. Not yet. I can picture the once cosy domestic kitchen space. The floor stained with my blood, the scuffed red footprints of the paramedics patterning the tiles. If the parcel hadn’t required a signature the postman would have left it on the front step but this day, to my detriment, he had taken it to the back door and seen me through the window. If only he had just gone on his whistling way I’d still be lying there now; or my body would be. My soul or whatever part of me it is that hurts so much, would be some other place, hopefully with James or at least in oblivion where pain and loneliness are no longer paramount.

“Don’t you have any friends?” When I shake my head, shamefaced at such a confession, my therapist raises an eyebrow. “None at all? No family?” I shake my head again. My mum died years ago, having spent the last of her energy helping me through university. I had been so wrapped up in James and my career I’d barely noticed her passing. And as for children, well James and I had decided against them, fearing they would get in the way of our painting, our joint career, that gargantuan thing that was
us
.

For the first time, I realise that had we had been less selfish and produced a brood of disruptive offspring, I’d have someone to lean on now, lots of small replica James’ ready to take me in and let me grow old in the bosom of their families. I’d have sons and daughters; grandchildren. If only we had been less unconventional I would have someone to love me now, a sort of build-your-own security package. But no, we made the decision and as a result, I grieve alone, and to grieve alone is so very hard. I never thought he’d run out on me like this.

It must be easier to be James.

To be past all this.

The girl fidgets on the end of my bed, stretches out her legs, wiggles her plump ankles, her feet encased in grubby pink velour slippers, like my nan used to wear. “Is it your first cut?”

“I’m sorry?”

She nods at my bandaged wrists. “Is it the first time you’ve done it?”

“Oh … yes,” I say, wishing she would bugger off so I could think about James.

“Are they deep?”

“Not deep enough; no.”

“Nor mine,” she sniffs. “Next time I’m doing them deeper and in the other direction, up and down. I did it wrong this time but next time I won’t. I don’t want to end up back in here. The boredom is killing me.”

I ignore the irony and store the snippet of information away while she sniffs again and twiddles her mousy hair, her mouth slightly open and a gleam of saliva on her lip.

I am so useless I’ve even got dying wrong.

The woman in the next bed lets out a wail and begins rocking back and forth, seeking comfort in a comfortless world. No one comes to attend her and the girl and I exchange glances. She raises her eyebrows dispassionately, leans forward to confide in me. “They found all ‘er dead babies buried in ‘er garden. She won’t say if they were dead when they came or if she smothered ‘em after. And there’s no way o’ tellin’.”

I look at the sad, grey woman who now has only herself to hold in her arms and decide perhaps it is better not to be a mother after all. Everyone in here is lonely. It is loneliness that drove us mad, took away our options. We are all lonely, and every one of us is crazy. We do not ask each other’s names for we have none. We are like spirits in purgatory, a shuttered, clinical purgatory, with some of us passing through to a better place, while others remain indefinitely, wailing like wraiths until our time is done here.

In the opposite bay another woman is sobbing as she has been since I woke up; she makes no sound but her cheeks are always wet, her eyes are raw as wounds. Empty boxes of tissues are abandoned on her bed, crumpled balls of sodden kleenex falling from the covers to litter the cold tiled floor. The ward sister will scold her when she comes and the junior nurse will grumble as she tidies up around her. Then they will administer her medication and the sad woman will cease weeping for a while and sleep and forget …but just for a while. I hope her dreams are happier than her waking. This woman never gives up crying for long enough to speak to us and none of us know her story.

In the last bed there is a girl who never cries. She cannot be more than fifteen. She doesn’t seem to like her bed and so she stands and stares blank-eyed from the barred window and speaks to nobody, not even her shrink –
therapist
.  Beneath her eyes there are old bruises, scars on her face and on her neck and she seems to be the saddest of us all.

This girl is unreachable, unknowable.

We are all sad here. Sad and alone and I am no different. My fine arts degree and reputation as an artist means nothing in here. Minor celebrity is irrelevant. Just like the rest of them, I am displaced and unloved and, just as in the outside world, I do not belong.

My accent and life experience sets me apart and, because I am educated the shrink,
therapist
, seems to think it’s different for me; as if the division of a piece of paper and letters after my name makes me somehow different.
But I am bloody well
hurting.

I comply with the therapist and do just as he says, answer with the words he wants to hear or I shall never get out. Escaping from here becomes my only aim although I have no idea where I will go next. I don’t want to go home.

I shy away from telling my analyst the reasons I can’t return or he would know I am not as recovered as I pretend. I am running from the past into a future I cannot bear. My life with James is back there and I know I need to look forward, even though the future rears before me like a black impenetrable wall, I have to climb it. I just need to learn how to do that.

Learn how to walk again.

I don’t expect I will ever run.

A few weeks before I am allowed to leave, the therapist,
not ‘shrink’ you notice
, gives me a pencil and some blank sheets of paper and I rediscover my art. There is a sort of healing in the act of reproducing the misery around me. For a few short hours every day I blank James’ face from my mind and make sketches of my fellow inmates – prisoners of misery. It stops me from thinking, numbs my sorrow and for a little while, I am almost me again – a sad, chastened, grown up version of me.