The Edge

Last night I went to Manderly again. Or some place very like it. Wonderland perhaps. When ever I have the dream I wake exhausted and my limbs feel heavy as though I have slept in cement and it is still clinging to my skin in little clumps.

At first it is always dark and then the light goes on, click, no gradual transition into brightness but a glaring shock of comfortable black and navy shapes into stark artificial light. A voice calls out that t is time for morning showers. I hear groans from my room mate’s bed and the blast of white from the overhead bulbs turns my vision red behind my stinging eyelids.

I always get up right away, if I don’t then the panic catches in my chest and my heart speeds up and so there is little point in staying in bed because I feel too dam worried to lie still. Fear needs movement, I have discovered. I sit up and swing my feet to the floor. Bare feet, short toes with short nails, no nail varnish. Legs in pyjama bottoms, either black or cream depending on my mood. Black if I am myself, cream or some light shade if I am feeling what my therapist calls ‘regressive’, meaning that I feel week and scared and in need of care and protection. Light colours make me feel protected, clean in some way that has nothing to do with dirt. Always a matching t shirt, no bra. My room mate wears a bra to bed. She told me she thinks it will keep her breasts uplifted. As she sleeps sat up, I can see her logic but it makes no difference as it is an unwired bra. They confiscated her pretty under wired bras because she could use them as a weapon, the wire anyway.

I hate feeling restrained so I revel in not needing to wear a bra in bed and in being about to roll and lounge and curl up as I please. My bed is like a little island that I own, it is clean and pure and I make it myself each day so it is untouched. Perfect.

Cold carpeted floor, a dull blue. Pick up my wash bag and towel, leave the room and out into the corridor. Nurse Angela stands about ten metres away from me, by the bathroom door. She calls to me to hurry up. Three people walking ahead of me, unsure footsteps like zombies. I look down and then I realise that I am treading on brambles.

The thorns bite my naked feet and the smell of wet vegetation fills up my nose. I tread another step and the briar’s catch and move with my feet as though they are joined in some way. I hear Nurse call at me to hurry, impatient, and I want to tell her that I am stuck but the words freeze in my throat because I can taste iron and salt and the air is too cold to breathe deeply. I look up to get her attention and I realise that somehow the distance has grown longer and farther and the walls are now thick tall bushes and overgrown walls and the brambles are wrapping around my legs so I know I must fall.

The hard ground jars my bones, my face in the brambles and that green taste has somehow got into my mouth, my nose, my ears are full of rushing rain and leaves. I can no longer get up or pull away from the ground, which is the only thing anchoring me to myself. The light from above is bright, bright, stark and white. No where to hide and no where to go. I hear Nurse calling for help, know she must be tugging my arm but she is not with me, in this bramble walk, and there is nothing to do but wrap myself in the brambles and hope that dark comes...

When I wake from the dream I feel as though it were the real world and I am now in my fantasy. I pick things up, I feel clothes on my body as if they belonged to someone else, as if a plate of glass lay between me and the world.

In this case, I come back to hear people laughing and yelling and the constant hum and thump of conversation and bad techno music. The room is too full, the beer is warm and sour to my stomach and I have been leaning against this wall for too long, hoping that people will think I am napping in a drunken happy haze and not trying to avoid being talked to. Sweaty boys maul scantily dressed girls, mascara smudges and clashing perfumes, cheap clothes from Primark with seams already splitting and arms, legs nudging mine as their owners sprawl over each other.

Someone has spilled beer on my bag, the air is thick with smoke and stale alcohol smell and hash. I feel violated by association. I feel angry at being touched so carelessly and I shove hard at the girl on my left, to free my bags strap and she glares at me then resumes kissing a blank faced blond man from my Monday seminar.

Pushing through the party to the front door, I don’t bother to look for my friend. My ride home is too drunk to drive and not ready to leave anyway. She invited me to be nice, to get me out of the house, as a favour to my sister. Amy wanted an evening in with Greg and so I agreed to go along. I piled into the untidy car which smelt of pot smoke and stale cigarettes beside my house mate, her boyfriend and some girl who’s name I forgot right after she said it because the radio went on and I found myself listening to the words of a particularly overplayed song rather than to her. Now this girl is underneath some boy playing a drunken game of Twister that someone has dug out, Kelly is in a corner with Rob and I have fought my way out of the body forest into the clean night air.

It is cool and clear and the night sky looks like a giant bowl. I wander down the street looking at the sky until I feel sick from motion sickness and have to perch on a garden wall to avoid vomiting. Looking up, looking down, both hazardous. I walk to the cross roads and chose the left turn as I am sure I saw a pub on that road. I can call a taxi and go home. A shower would be perfect, then a bath. Scrub myself clean then relax. I hate the European tradition of just bathing, lying in your own filth then getting up as if you are clean. After that I will go to my room, put on one of my DVDs and lose myself in another world again.

Brambles. These are in some one else garden and they over lie the path slightly. I cannot just side step them. I have to touch, to feel if they exist or if I exist. I find a particularly large throne and push my thumb into it, the cushion of flesh spotting dark blood in the lamplight. I bleed, therefore I am. I push each finger in turn into the thorn and make a perfect dot of proof on each, then break off a prickly branch of the bush to play with as I walk.

I dimple my palms with stigmata points as I walk, fixating on the pain and the shape of the dots. The bramble branch is more real than I am. I get fed up with this task after a while and plant it into the earth in someone’s small patch of flower bed so it wont feel useless or unwanted now that I am done with it. I always feel bad about leaving this behind or throwing things away, I have never learned to ignore the fact that inanimate objects don’t have feelings.

I wander on and think I will check my phone to check my location. Opening my bag, the wallet and other objects inside are unfamiliar. Picking out the wallet- cheap purple glitter vinyl instead of rough woven blue fair-trade cloth - I open it to discover a stranger’s cards, student ID and a photo of her and a dog. No money. I look through the rest of the bag, make up, used bus tickets and flyers for events at the Union. I clearly have picked up the wrong bag in my hurry to escape and I took that of the girl who I shoved over. An innocent mistake as they were both soft black and white squared leather to look like a chess board but an irritating one as it means mine is still at the party.

I have two choices. Walk back to the party to get my bag or walk back into Bath along the empty roads and streets. It will take at least an hour, probably more. It is still a better option than going back to that house and then having to explain my taking a strangers bag. I decide to walk. At least it isn’t raining.

I continue down towards the pub. I remember the route going out. In the dark rushing beside the car windows I saw the pub, a long dark road with trees overcrowding the sides and then clear lanes beside the main road into the city. I focus on the floor again. Each crack in the pavement makes me feel like I am crossing a vast continent. I nearly trip over a number of irregular levels in the unkempt pavements. I feel sorry for ants.

The dream creeps up on me again, the smell of vegetation fills my nose again and I look up to see the road ahead walled in by high heavy hedges and the ground is grass and weeds. The smell of rain and wet leaves and disturbed wilderness. I tread carefully, fearing brambles but these are all gone, all gone and now there is just a long walk, no turns, hedges either side. From experience I know that even if I run I will never get any further on. I am always stuck here.

The ground when I hit it is harder than usual. Gritty road is beneath me and it presses diamond shapes into my outstretched hands and I feel the splitting of skin over my knee. Rolling over, I see my jeans torn open and a gash four inches wide has opened in my leg. The road is of that rough old surface that causes terrible wounds if you fall on it. The pavement has stopped some time ago as I am now in a dark lane, the sides filled with trees and hedges. For a second I wonder if I am still dreaming but the pain in my scuffed hands and bleeding knee warns me I am not.

Stuck in my own head, I have wandered in the wrong direction. I am lying on the uncomfortable road, holding a strangers bag, with no phone, no money and no one knows where I am. A limbo right here on earth. Getting to my feet makes my knee ache and sting afresh. I seem to have ripped open the soft skin beneath the kneecap and blood has stained the fabric of my jeans.

Looking around I figure I shall carry on up the hill. Once at the top I might be able to see where I am and work from there. Limping, the useless bag over my shoulder, I reach the summit and see the city of Bath a few miles distance. Around 100 years ahead, down the hill, I can see light from a house which is set back from the road.

When I reach the gate I take stock. Big houses like this tend to have big dogs or worse yet, yappy dogs. I do not like dogs. The gate is a full barn gate, with a massive catch. Inside, closing it behind me, a shining Volvo sits on the driveway, tended flower beds outside the house and neat gravel walk paving it. To my left a path leading round into the garden, framed by high green hedges, neatly trimmed. To my right a large old garage in 20’s style, open.

The door’s knocker is polished and looks like a lion. I feel worried it will eat my hand when I raise the knocker. The door is blue. There is a light on in the hall and lights on upstairs. I wait for the owner to answer the door, probably an old woman and her husband.

When it opens I see an older man, not elderly but in his late forties, dressed in crisp white shirt, waistcoat and black trousers. Little beard, dark twinkly eyes. Enquiring. Right away he looks at my damaged knee.

“Bit of accident?” He asks, shifting his gaze to my face. I consider him, older, slight paunch, dignified looking. I put him down as a possible bottom pincher but nothing else. A safe enough man to trust for now.

I explain about taking the wrong bag then taking a wrong turn. Can I come in to ring a taxi? He smiles and opens the door a little wider, inviting me in. I step over the threshold and he leads the way into a cosy living room where he tells me his telephone is.

Looking around, I decide I like this room. One large velvet sofa along the back wall with several framed photographs of beautifully architectured buildings above it. Cream walls with an old fashioned, low beamed ceiling. A fireplace neatly made up but not lit and candles on the mantle. One window to the left of the fireplace then another at the far end of the room. All the other walls are lined with bookshelves, heaving with books and there are some more books on the coffee table. All told, it is a neat scholarly haven. On a small side table beside the sofa there is an old fashioned bell telephone and a pad beside it.

My host has looked out his copy of the phone book and is leafing through it to find me taxi numbers. He hands me the book and I stop by the telephone because it puzzles me. I have to ask him to dial for me. The first three numbers are busy, the fourth has no driver available and the fifth can only come in two hours. At this point my host suggests driving me home himself.

I guess that it must speak volumes about me that I say yes. In my defence, I am usually a pretty good judge of people with regard to if they are dangerous. This man radiated old fashioned charm but no malice. I knew where his house was, his name- Simon Carmichael, I saw it on a little stack of torn open envelopes beside the phone, plenty of details so if he were going to abduct or rape me then he would need to kill me afterwards. I saw nothing of a killer in him. Plenty of people will say that I couldn’t possibly know anything about him, that he could kill me and get away with it and that I was being really stupid not to keep trying taxi numbers. Hopefully people will understand when I say that my overpowering desire to get home overrode any other desire.

He stood up and then glanced again at my knee. It was a bloody mess and looked dreadful. Would I care to use his bathroom? He could find me cotton wool and something to clean it and perhaps some dressing? I wanted to leave it but he insisted that I clean it, for the sake of the cleanliness of his car if not for myself.

He found me cotton wool pads, he found me a bottle of antiseptic wash and while he hunted down dressings, I went to the bathroom and ran water into the sink. When I opened the bottle, the smell of antiseptic flooded the room and my mind with images and other places. My old wounds, now healed, whiter than white on my pale skin, the daily careful cleaning. The smell of the hospital corridor after Clare Angel had tried to slash her wrists with a staple dug from the wall, after Nelly had bashed her head into the security door, after I had tried to throw myself down the fire exit and gashed my shoulder on the railing. I felt sick and had to breathe through my nose in order to stay in the moment. I felt that I could not go into my mind while in a stranger's house.

Wound cleaned, dressing applied and hands washed, my host led me over to the shining green Volvo. The radio came on as the engine started, a strange clattering language emitting from the tinny car speakers. He looked at me and smiled, turning it off.

“I had this on earlier to hear a particular programme. I shall assume you know little of Celtic languages? No, they are a dying part of a forgotten society. Their speakers have been amalgamated into Great Britain and so, with the exception of a few devotees and proud nationalists, we are losing even the story’s that were once so well known.” I asked if he were a scholar, it seemed to fit with his house. Another smile, accompanied with an eye twinkle.

“I am, in part. I have the honour of being a professor of literature at the University of Bath, and I specialise in Celtic literature and languages. The languages and dialects themselves were originally just a medium to learn the literature but over time, I have developed some degree of fluency and enjoyment of them for languages sake as well. I officially took a sabbatical this year in order to finish writing a book on the subject but I continue to privately teach and to lecture of the decline of the fallen Celt's and the culture that we have lost. Shall I assume that you are a student?”

I nodded. He was waiting for a response as we sped at an easy pace through the twisting dark country roads so I expanded.

“I'm doing a master's in Literature, focusing on how Bram Stoker placed women in a highly sexualised world yet insisted on their being angelic and almost sexless as characters.”

He laughed and just then we broke free of the tangled lanes and reached the bright neon orange of the main road. He knew the street my house was on and as we drove towards it, he asked if I had preceded my MA with a degree in Literature and had it also been at Bath. Despite knowing that there was no reason, I hesitated before beginning the lie about having done an Open University course as I was working full time after collage. I had never actually done any job and I did not want to lie to this rather sweet man who was playing good Samaritan. He noticed and said gently “ You need not feel that you should tell me anything you don’t want. I just thought you would prefer some conversation to the radio. More reassuring.”

I shook my head. We had turned into the narrow street where I lived and he pulled in outside the house. I knew I should simply thank him, offer to pay for his petrol, get out and leave but I felt frozen in my seat. The stained orange light streaming into the car felt oppressive and I felt trapped by some unspecific force I couldn’t identify. I could hear some unspecified noise that kept my attention like a rabbit in a hedgerow. I realised I was drifting away again and pulled myself together. I made myself smile, thank him, my face a brittle mask that was slipping second by second. A taxi drove past, occupants loudly drunk.