In A Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 12

  A week after he sends the letter an envelope arrives from Switzerland. He doesn’t recognize the handwriting, but the stamp is clearly visible, and it’s with a sense of excitement that he sits down to read. When he opens the envelope his own letter falls out, like a piece of the past returned to his hands. The single stiff card that accompanies it says, Dear Sir, I’m very sorry to break the death of Jerome to you. He died on the 26th of November in an accident of motorbike. His mother asked me to send you your letter back. The signature at the bottom is that of a stranger, and even as he sits at the epicentre of this soundless white explosion, that separate watchful part of his brain is back again, reading over his shoulder, trying to decipher the name, aware of all the oddities of language, working out when it happened. One week to the day after I got back home.

  A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

  He sits for a long time at the table, not seeing, not hearing anything. When he feels strong enough to move he gets up very slowly and locks the house and goes out, walking into the world. His body feels old and through the dark lens on his eyes everything he knows looks strange and unfamiliar, as if he’s lost in a country he’s never visited before.

  THREE

  THE GUARDIAN

  Even before their departure, when he goes to meet her flight from Cape Town, he knows he’s in trouble. He last saw her a month ago and she was in a bad way then, but look at her now. The first one off the plane, striding far ahead of the crowd. Her peroxide job has gone wrong, so that her hair has turned a strange yellow colour, standing out in angry spikes from her head. But more than this, something has changed inside her, which you can see from a long way off. She seems to burn with a luminous white light. Her face is knotted and anxious, bunched in on itself, and it takes her a long time to notice him. Then her expression clears, she smiles, as they embrace she is his old friend again.

  He has been up in Pretoria for a few weeks, visiting his mother. But even before he left Cape Town, Anna was already losing the plot, living in fast motion, speeding along, saying and doing inappropriate things, and the knowledge that she was out of control showed in her face like a concealed pain. All of this has happened before, but it’s only a few days ago that her condition has finally acquired a name. Although it’s come from her psychiatrist in Cape Town, the diagnosis is one which Anna’s lover and I and even Anna herself all regard with suspicion. For us she remains human first and foremost, impervious to labels.

  He is pretty sure about all this until he sees her. It’s obvious that something in her has come loose from its moorings and is sliding around inside. There are problems ahead, I realize, and the first moment comes before we’ve even left the ground. In the departure lounge she orders a beer, then looks at her companion in bemusement as he stares.

  What. What’s the matter.

  You’re not supposed to be doing that. We spoke about this yesterday, remember.

  It’s just one drink.

  You’re not allowed even one drink.

  She has come with a small pharmacy in her bag, tranquillizers and mood-stabilizers and anti-depressants, which have to be taken in various combinations at different times, but alcohol or recreational drugs will undo the medication, and she solemnly swore to me over the telephone the day before that she wouldn’t touch them. She has given the same pledge to both her lover and her psychiatrist.

  When I remind her of this promise she angrily cancels the order, but no sooner has the plane taken off than she orders a double whisky. A little drink every now and then, she says, won’t do me any harm. I’m speechless at her defiance, but the incident is rapidly subsumed in an ongoing disorder. When the food arrives she messes it over herself, then clambers over another passenger on her way to the bathroom to clean up. As the journey goes on, she becomes frantic to the point of tears because she’s not allowed to smoke a cigarette, and when they arrive in Bombay after midnight she spends the long taxi ride into town unzipping and rummaging through all the pockets of her rucksack in search of some missing item. Once they’re installed at the hotel she becomes a bit calmer, but almost immediately she leaves him in the room, locking the door behind her, and goes to the rooftop restaurant for yet another little drink.

  On the last occasion that she went off the rails, years ago, she landed in a Cape Town clinic, emaciated and scarred with cigarette burns. It took months for her to recover, a process that she fetishized in her photographs, many of them pictures of herself naked, all her wounds on display. The episode is sexy in her mind, no cause for shame, and culminated in several bouts of electro-shock therapy, which she’d asked for, she later told me, as a substitute for killing herself.

  It’s partly to avoid a repetition of the same scenario that he’s invited her to come along with him on this, his third trip to India. He’s going for six months and the plan is that Anna will join him for the first eight weeks. And it seemed in the beginning like a good idea to everybody. Back home in Cape Town she has a powerful job with a very high profile and a future full of impressive possibilities. Normally she is more than a match for the challenges of her work, attacking it with a fervour that now looks suspect. But both her job and her relationship are under strain at the moment, and this is meant to be time out. A couple of months away from home, a chance for Anna to find herself and stabilize. Maybe it’s just what she needs.

  Although the start has been tough, things will be easier, he reasons, when they reach their destination. They are heading for a tiny fishing village in south Goa, where he has spent the previous two winters. There will be nothing to do except lie around in the sun or go for long walks on the beach or swim in the warm sea. Surely the indolence will slow her down. Besides, as her psychiatrist has said, it will take a couple of weeks for the medicine to kick in properly. Better times lie ahead.

  Before they can fully relax, however, there is still one more journey to get through, and on the train the next day a new drama develops. He is strict about supervising her medication, and even in the rocking train carriage he makes sure that she counts out her assortment of pills. As she starts swallowing them he turns away, but sees from the corner of one eye the jerk of her arm as she throws a tablet out of the window. What are you doing. She instantly breaks down weeping, I can’t handle it, these tranquillizers knock me out, I can’t function. He feels a stab of pity, at this early point he still has patience and compassion. You have to take them, Anna, your body will adjust.

  He will soon establish, when he sits down to examine the note from her psychiatrist, that she’s been double-dosing on one of the tranquillizers, and when this imbalance has been corrected the medicine won’t touch her. But right now she sleeps most of the journey away, while he stares out of the window at the changing landscape outside. He is glad of this chance just to reflect quietly, while the dry vastness of the plains gives way by degrees to the lush, steamy heat of Goa.

  He is middle-aged now and his travelling habits have changed. He has become more sedentary, staying in one place for longer periods of time, with less of that youthful rushing around. But this new approach has its problems. On a previous trip to India, waiting in a town far to the north for some bureaucratic business to be finished, he became aware that he was forming connections with the place, giving money to a sick man here, calling the vet to atten
d to a stray dog there, setting up a web of habits and social reflexes that he usually travels to escape. He wonders now if he hasn’t taken a step further down that road by bringing his troubled friend with him on the trip. Here they are, barely arrived, and already he feels chords of alarm twanging deep down. But the motion and heat are numbing, and he’s calmer by the time evening comes and they have broken out at last into paddy fields and stretches of blue water between palm trees. Anna wakes and looks out of the window in amazement. Are we there yet. Almost.

  The sun is setting as they reach Margao, a dirty bustling town like countless others they’ve passed along the way, but fortunately there’s no need for them to linger. Their destination is a twenty minute ride by auto-rickshaw through tracts of greenery with the last golden light cooling overhead, and somewhere along the way she puts a hand on his arm and tells him how beautiful it is. Thank you for bringing me, she says. I’m so glad to be here.

  When they arrive at the little family-run hotel where he usually stays, there are familiar faces to welcome them and a room has been kept aside. He takes a shower and when he comes downstairs to the restaurant she’s drinking a gin-and-tonic. Oh come on, she cries when she sees his face, I’m on holiday, what do you want from me.

  He and Anna have a good friendship, she is like a sister to him, somebody he loves and who makes him laugh. Somebody he wants to protect. It’s in that capacity that he’s escorting her now, as her guardian. In that last telephone conversation before she left Cape Town, the same one in which she promised never to drink, she had asked him, almost as a challenge, are you up to it, do you think you can handle me. He’d answered breezily, not thinking about it much, yes of course. It didn’t feel like a heavy undertaking at the time, because he’s always had a cooling, calming influence on her, she’s always listened to him. But already, just a few days into the trip, he understands that they’re playing by a new set of rules. She and he have always been on the same side, but it’s as if she’s changed allegiances somehow, to who or what he doesn’t know, though he comes gradually to understand that the danger to Anna, the force from which she must be protected, is inside her.

  He gets an inkling of how strong that force is when, out of curiosity, he takes half of one of her tranquillizers. The effect is devastating. He’s wiped out, flat on his back, for twelve hours, and for the whole of the next day he’s groggy and weak. After that he looks at her with a new awareness. She’s swallowing these pills three times a day and they don’t appear even to slow her down any more. What is this thing that’s taken up station inside her, driving along with so much fury and power.

  Her illness, which he comes to think of as a person separate to Anna, makes her behave in bizarre and unsettling ways. The drinking is one sign, but there are others. She has an obsession with packing and unpacking her rucksack, at any time of the day or night this compulsion overcomes her, then there is the manic flurrying of zips, the clothing piled up on the bed. He watches with troubled fascination as she separates different items into different compartments, shirts here, panties there, dresses somewhere else again, and each set of garments is packed into a plastic bag with a label on it. When he points out to her how crazy this is she laughs and agrees with him, but it doesn’t stop her from repeating the exercise just a couple of hours later. And she’s awake every morning at first light. She has been given sleeping pills, which she’s supposed to take every night, but often she doesn’t bother, then he is awoken by the noise of her blundering and fumbling as she goes out onto the balcony for her first cigarette, sorry did I disturb you, I was trying to be quiet. Nor do the other pills appear to be working. Her moods continue to veer wildly between elation and despair, she can be laughing at breakfast and sobbing by mid-morning, he doesn’t know how to cope with these extremes.

  Nevertheless, they manage to have a good time together. The beach is just down the road and they spend hours there each day. They walk and swim and Anna takes hundreds of photographs, clicking the shutter voraciously, sucking the world into her camera in rectangular pieces, the fishing boats on the sea, the sun rising and setting, drops of water on dark skin, the faces of people passing by. When I look at these images now, years later, they call back a sense of idyll and innocence which perhaps was never true, not even then. Though I know from other visits how fine a place it is, and if the air is disturbed every now and then by the death-screams of a pig, well, there is slaughter even in paradise.

  It’s on one of the first evenings, as they sit on their balcony together, that she says, it would be so nice if we could make love. He looks at her in astonishment. She quickly adds, I know it’s impossible, but I was just thinking.

  A long silence follows. Their room is on the first floor, on a level with the tops of the palm trees in the yard, and in the last light the fronds take on a soft, reflected glow. Anna, he says. We can’t.

  I know, I know, forget it.

  Your girlfriend is my best friend. And I don’t think about you in that way.

  I shouldn’t have said it.

  Anyway, I thought you weren’t into men.

  She giggles. You know, she says, I’m not so sure. I’ve been having some thoughts.

  This is something new. He knows that she was seriously involved with one or two men quite long ago, but in recent years she’s been adamantly inclined in the other direction. He wonders whether it’s not just a reaction to the strain her relationship is under at home. Anna hasn’t once written to her partner back in Cape Town, she hasn’t made a single phone call, and when I’ve encouraged her to get in touch she only shakes her head. She doesn’t want to, she says, she thinks it’s over between them, but he knows that her partner has been hurt by Anna’s silence.

  He doesn’t push the point, it’s not his business, and anyway he thinks she’ll feel differently in a few days. But he experiences a complicated guilt when, perhaps that very same night, or perhaps another soon after, she goes with some American man to his room. We didn’t make love, she tells me afterwards, we just fooled around, but oh it was so wonderful to be held, to be touched like that.

  This puts him into a horrible position, where his loyalties are divided. He’s in regular contact with Anna’s girlfriend back home, reporting on her condition, but how can he talk about this. Yet Anna is counting on his silence, she would regard it as betrayal if he spilled the beans. He’s angry that she’s made him complicit in what may be a widening gap, so it comes as a relief when the American takes fright. The next night, when she tries to arrange a liaison, he tells her that he has some important e-mails to write, and the following day he leaves town.

  But she doesn’t give up. The idea is in her head now and she’s on the search. She’s a strikingly pretty woman and in her current state especially so, lean and glowing with inner fire. All kinds of men are sniffing around. In just a day or two she meets Jean, a fifty year old French traveller staying at the same hotel. When I come to the room that night after doing e-mail I find the two of them sitting on the balcony, cooing and giggling together. Jean’s taken some of my tranquillizers to relax, she tells me, do you want some too. No thanks, I say, and withdraw into the room, and at that moment I retreat from the pair of them in another sense as well. I don’t mention Jean to Anna’s girlfriend and I find ways to rationalize my silence to myself, this is a weightless holiday romance, nothing more, he’s leaving in a few days, perhaps it will even be good for her. And who could take Jean seriously, a sad-looking cadaverous man full of melancholic vacancy, who speaks platitudes in a sonorous voice. Back home in Paris he’s a builder by profession, but he does sculpture on the side. He claims he once danced with Nureyev.

  This is what Anna’s been looking for and she falls for him in a big way, suddenly it’s all Jean this and Jean that, and then they’re heading off on a rented scooter up the coast for a few days. I am very uneasy with this arrangement, I try to talk her out of it, but she laughs me off, I’m fine don’t worry about me. And it’s true that he is ceaselessly frett
ing over her, perhaps his concern is making things worse, maybe she’ll be better if she has some time away from him. Mixed in with the mistrust is a good dose of relief too, it’s pleasant to have her off my hands for a while. He hasn’t come here, after all, just to be a chaperone, he’s come to do some work, and in her absence he settles down to it, filling up pages with words. The plan is that we’ll be doing some travelling ourselves when they get back, going down south together at the time of Jean’s departure for home, so that very soon this peculiar interlude will be over.

  Though it isn’t so simple. The few days in Jean’s company have sealed him in Anna’s mind as her future and her fate. When she gets back she’s full of crazy talk about moving to France to live, about having his child, and this talk will only get more fantastic as the rest of the trip goes on. The little romance has become a relationship, if only in her mind, and this despite the fact that he, Jean, refuses to become intimate with her. Her real life in Cape Town seems to have been annulled. More alarming is that Jean seems to have no idea of how ill she is, he treats her condition as a bad drama that’s been foisted on her by manipulative people, you must just believe in yourself, he’s been telling her, and you’ll get better, you don’t need to be taking all these pills. She repeats these insights wistfully, hoping that I’ll agree, but what she doesn’t tell me is that he’s also been feeding her hash and cocaine and huge amounts of alcohol. She is noticeably looser when she returns, more obviously frayed at the edges, and this dissolution seems to feel like freedom to her, something she must pursue in order to get well.