Message in a Bottle

The situation is this: I am, post-shingles, or very nearly, rather more debilitated than usual. To re-iterate my idea of chronic illness being like living in another country, I have moved further abroad. I am trying not to let it feel like exile but, let me put it this way – you don’t want to come here, really. Let’s imagine I am here so you don’t have to be. Anything you want to know, I’ll tell you, I can still write – a bit. Short sentences, and if I suddenly trail off in mid sentence or thought, you will understand. So, no, don’t come here: there’s no night-life, not much day-life either, and you can’t move around much. The food’s rubbish, just marmite sandwiches (ok, and fruit), and whatever else is around, you won’t fancy it. Books, yes, but you won’t be able to read them for more than ten minutes at a stretch. Friends are those dots on the horizon that wave to you and shout things like hope you’re better soon. In reply you are allowed to send them smoke signals. I saw one today in the doctor’s waiting room and ignored her in case I ran out of steam mid-conversation. However one explains, it always makes a bad impression.

It’s not so bad once you get used to the light. You have to get new spectacles, obviously, to carry on reading the signs and see what’s around. My neighbour’s tree is full of small cherries. My apple tree already heavy with fruit. I hear the floods have been very bad. News reaches me.

Reviewing the Situation

Shingles seem to be winning at the moment. I had no idea – how can one with a name like Shingles? It sounded so musical and benign, a nursery book kind of a word or Brighton beach, surely no worse than having, say, the Sniffles, and just a bit of a rash? I heard people refer to it as painful but was never close enough to anyone who had it to know what that might mean.

When awake the best thing is to keep distracting myself, but one is limited by not being able to focus for very long and being tired. I can only lie down and sleep for an hour or two before pain kicks in and the only thing to do is get up. I have been given carte blanche by the doctor to take as many prescription painkillers as I want but they don’t really stop the pain – apparently nothing does with this (apart from drugs with side-effects I can’t tolerate), you just have to sit it out and hope it goes away sooner rather than later. Having M.E. does of course add a further dimension to the picture. It may be time for some therapeutic self-pity, but that, like the pills, doesn't really hit the spot . I have, for the moment, given up not smoking. It is, as Lou Reed once said, “a health measure.” In his case, it stood between him and a heroin habit. In my case, it just makes everything feel better to say that at least I can punctuate the day (and night) with a cigarette here and there.

I have, though, been considering the Doppelganger character. I said she had to go but she is still hovering around, which is a bit of a liberty considering I haven’t even written about her that much. Though she pretends to be me, she isn’t at all. For a start, she has never smoked, though she may have had the odd puff of home-grown marijuana in her teens. The real difference between us is that she is essentially English whereas I am the daughter of refugees (it’s a long story) and have never felt myself to be that. She is wisteria, damp gingerbread, pressed flowers and sagging curtain hems. I don’t mean to sound disparaging, she just is.

It is of course possible that I am a figment of her imagination but, not being a writer, she won’t know what to do with me, whereas I can do whatever I want. She might take herself off to see a counsellor and between them both they will finish me off or I will be in some way absorbed by her so that she and I become one, a more rounded, integrated sort of person, but essentially tame. I won’t let that happen. But wait:

“What does it mean,” says the counsellor, “that this shadow side of yourself is someone who refuses to be tame?”
“I suppose,” she will dutifully respond, “that it’s the part of me I never really wanted to look at or admit to.” The counsellor smiles encouragingly.
“And what do you think she would be saying right now if she were here?” Doppelganger blushes, discreetly so no-one would notice, but she can feel the heat in her cheeks and the back of her neck.
“I suppose she’d swear a lot.” (Damn right I would, sweetheart).
“Yes?” says the counsellor.
“And actually, she’d probably –” but she won’t say it of course, it would be rude, so I will say it for her. She’d put the money down and say thanks, but no thanks, like the hip gunslinger that I am and she can never be. Ok – it’s not what I would actually do, but I’d be completely conscious of wanting to, which she isn’t. Or is she? Bugger. Are we merging already?
“And what does she look like, the shadow?” says counsellor, still on the track to balance and integration.
“Well – ” she hesitates. (Don’t say it, just don’t). “She looks a bit like me, really.” Fuck.

But she wouldn’t wear a cast-off grey hoodie, would she? Especially not one with a Weirdfish logo that teenagers wear, no, she really wouldn’t. She has an embroidered cotton handkerchief in her hands that she twists and twists as she talks, and she smooths the folds on her crushed cotton skirt.

Other than this, she talks about her children and her unfulfilled ambitions (which were what?) and the shadow that follows her, the sense that there is something just around the corner waiting to reveal itself because she is a (what did they used to call them?) – a “Sensitive” – a clairvoyant (which is not the same as reading the signs, so don’t think it), only she doesn’t know it yet, and the counsellor (who is nothing like Ms Melancholy) may well be sneaking a look at her watch wondering if the hour is up yet and whether it isn’t time for her to go.

Perhaps she will catch shingles.

Shingle Thursday

Perhaps Shingles didn’t feel I was giving it enough respect. Anyway, it seems to have kicked in a bit more now. I feel I am having the real experience. If you are going to go down with something, you may as well go down with it good and proper so as to have something interesting to talk about later on. In some respects, though, I am fine with things being boring: saw the doctor again today because of something under the eyelid. Keep an eye on it, she said cheerfully, (eye: geddit?) we don’t want you going blind. I told her that I would and agreed that no we didn’t, went to the chemist to replenish my stock of Anadin and homoeopathic stuff and wandered into the village community centre café for some lovely home-made fish pie, then back home for an intense, head-throbbing sleep.

I dreamed I was in the sitting room of the flat I lived in when I was thirteen, looking out of the large sash window over to Primrose Hill. The Blue Meanies, said someone behind me. It’s ok, I said, I like them. Then the estate agent rang and woke me – damnation, and I would so much like to have stayed there, listening to Sergeant Pepper on the record player. It was looking at the Youtube film that Cusp put up on her blog the other day – an excerpt from the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine - that must have done it. It hadn’t been made yet when I was thirteen, but dreams are not constrained by details. And the voice behind me, I think, belonged to a woman called Jill. She and her friend Thomasina were employed by my mother to keep me company while I had chicken pox. Connections!

Jill and Thom must have been in their late twenties. They worked for a TV company, as set designer and P.A. but were on a break. My mother and sister must have been away, the au pair too, because there were only the three of us in the flat for several weeks and Jill and Thom slept in my mother’s double bed. I had only heard the word “Lesbian” once in the context of a very curious conversation with someone a year previously who asked me whether I had ever heard of a woman getting married to another woman. Well, she told me, one of the women pretends she’s a man and they sleep in the same bed and it’s really disgusting. I pictured one of the women with a moustache and beard and then my imagination fogged out. Being a late developer and almost unbelievably innocent, I had only just cottoned on to the word sex, without really knowing what it meant.

One day, while we were all sitting on the floor watching Top of the Pops, Thom with a headache, Jill got up, knelt behind her and began to massage her neck and shoulders. Thom shut her eyes, leaned back and smiled, then turned to look up at her. It was a long time they took to look into each other’s eyes, Jill’s hands still touching her neck – and then I knew, or it was the beginning of something understood: they were lesbians and what was between them had something to do with sex as much as, and perhaps more than, the things I heard my friends whispering about.

The estate agent was ringing to tell me that the prospective buyer who has offered us much less than the asking price, is still interested and wants to re-negotiate. In the circumstances, I am finding it hard to muster enthusiasm. I am shingling and thinking about my daughter in London who has much on her plate and a cloud over her head, and Sergeant Pepper’s band who blasted the Blue Meanies, and the hills being alive “wid dee sound of muzeeeeek”.

Shinglebell Flop

These things are sent to educate us. I thought that shingles was just chicken pox-lite with an irritating rash. I did wonder about the spots that have appeared on the side of my face and forehead (surely I hadn’t been eating that much chocolate) and was baffled by the strange headaches and shooting pains that have been waking me in the night. The general malaise did, I suppose, have a different note to it, but one puts that kind of thing down to the usual M.E. picture. Something that should have alerted me is the fact that I have gone off food. No, it’s worse than that – I have gone off healthy, nourishing food and want only things like sliced white bread and really bad Chinese takeaways. It’s like being pregnant (and come to think of it I feel sick most of the time too); I remember then wanting only Mother’s Pride and fishpaste sandwiches or pie and mash from Kelly’s in Roman Road near where I lived in Bethnal Green.

I have already said that living with long-term illness is like being in another country. This kind of thing just pushes you a bit more inland, that’s all. The doctor (one who doesn’t know me) said I would have to be signed off work for at least three weeks and that I’d probably be feeling very ill. So not much changes, really. And the thing is that I can’t put my hand on my heart and say I feel so very much worse than usual. I have been in training for the last 20+ years and so it’s easier for me than for someone who has enjoyed normal health. Yet I have had the first ever expression of sympathy from my mother (“Poor you – how awful!”) which sits rather strangely, though I tried to accept it in the spirit I imagine it was given.

The difficult thing is that I won’t be able to go out to my writing and poetry-related activities. I won’t be up to it and there is, in any case, the question of passing something on to others. The thought of spending even more time on my own doesn’t worry me. I am not solitary by nature and love the fun, conversation and company of friends, the casual or significant meetings that happen with strangers, small talk, deep talk, the possibility of connection, something created, ephemeral perhaps, or ground beneath the feet, whatever. But I have over the years, of necessity, acquired a taste for solitude - or it has become a habit, a way of life. If I were suddenly able to be properly active again, I would now need long spaces on my own. Perhaps it would be different, though, if it weren’t for the fact that I live with someone whose company I love – and who I see every day – Him Outdoors, the bringer of Chinese takeaway, laughter and warmth, unswerving supporter of Arsenal FC and of Signs.

Well, I will just have to get on and write more. Mr. Moon Topples, who is recovering from a fever, has just made a vow to write two thousand words a day plus “bitchy blogposts about writing” (yes please!) and perhaps I ought to join him. But on the other hand I wouldn’t want to make a promise I might not keep.